Animosity Read online

  “Maybe you shouldn’t deal with it, either,” he said pointedly.

  Amado ignored him. “How many times have we had these conversations, over the corpse of one of your relationships? Doesn’t it make you wonder about yourself, that you’ve been to so many women’s funerals—metaphorically speaking?”

  “No,” he lied.

  Amado adored women, all women, every kind of woman. He was the only man Ross had ever known who had never spoken a disrespectful word about any woman and who could talk about them with a nearly clinical eye and do so without a hint of salaciousness. He was an unabashed romantic about them, and if he was disappointed or treated meanly by a woman—a rarity—he attributed it to the frailty of human nature, not to the foibles of their sex.

  “Ah, and speaking of a woman,” Amado said, nodding toward the door to the tavern.

  Two women were just then entering the patio, following the stumpy, earnest Nata, who was taking them to their table. Ross recognized Anita Beaton, a seasonal resident from Los Angeles, a thin, angular woman who kept her railish fingers on the pulse of San Rafael’s arts establishment in which she mixed at the upper echelons. She was precisely the kind of woman Ross found it easy to be rude to. Her sole interest in life was the cultivation and commerce of gossip. She trolled the taverns, chic restaurants, and dinner parties of San Rafael’s summer circuit and created and traded scandals and rumors of scandals. She was every bit the vulture that she resembled.

  But it was the woman who accompanied her who was the object of Amado’s reference, a woman so striking that she actually sucked all the attention away from Anita, who became, in her presence, a mere tagalong.

  She was just shy of being able to be described as tall and had an olive complexion that appeared even darker in the diffused lights of the lanterns. Her hair was dark and thick, and she wore it in an unfussy style at shoulder length. She avoided everyone’s eyes as she walked beside Anita, who was doing her best to catch as many eyes as possible. When Anita stopped to chat with an actress whose recent box office success had resuscitated a stumbling career that had almost rendered her invisible, the dark woman moved on, following Nata to their table even though Anita had clearly wanted to introduce her.

  “Céleste Lacan,” Amado explained. “Arrived about a month ago with Anita’s name. You know, one of those tenuous connections one carries to another country. Anita knows a good thing when she sees it, and took Céleste under her bony wing.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Your city—Paris.”

  “Really? What’s she doing here?”

  Amado was still watching her, smiling appreciatively. “Looking for a summer home.”

  He gave Amado a skeptical look.

  “According to Anita,” Amado went on, “she’s originally from Mexico City. Father was a Scot who went there to work with Petroleos Mexicanos back in the forties. Her mother was a Mexican, an aspiring actress who actually made several films. Céleste was an only child, packed away to London to be educated when she was a young girl. At nineteen she was abruptly called home when her father was kidnapped by guerrillas. He was killed when the oil company dickered too long about the ransom. Mama was left financially comfortable. She and Céleste moved to Europe . . . lived in various great cities. I gather Mama was a bit of a free spirit. A crazy little thing. I think Cé1este was the levelheaded one and had her hands full with Mama.

  “Mama died three years ago. Céleste married a Mr. Lacan shortly after that . . . marriage fell apart shortly after that . . . estranged . . . separate homes.”

  Ross glanced at her as she ordered a drink from Nata.

  “You’ve met her?”

  “Once at a cocktail party at Anita’s. Once at a gallery opening. Visited with her fifteen minutes or so each time.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Amado thoughtfully savored a mouthful of maduro smoke.

  “Imagine you’re looking at the new moon,” he said. “There’s the sharp, bright crescent . . . and there, next to it, tantalizingly unavailable to you but faintly visible, is the greater moon, veiled in shadow. That’s Céleste Lacan. You know when you’re talking to her and looking at her that the greatest part of her, the most intriguing part, is . . . just there . . . hazily visible, veiled in shadow.”

  “That’s dramatic.”

  “And apt.”

  Ross looked at her again through the pools of lantern light. Anita had rejoined her and was telling her something. Céleste was listening, her back straight as she leaned forward slightly, one elbow on the table as her fingers idly combed through her hair, the other arm in her lap, her breasts resting on the marble top of the table.

  She was listening politely, but without genuine interest. She didn’t have a film star’s polished attractiveness, but if you scanned past her in the course of surveying the garden, your eyes would snap back for a closer look. Beautiful wouldn’t be the first word to come to mind.

  “She’s attracted some attention here,” Amado said. “Anita’s found it convenient to be her friend and introduce her around. I’m guessing Ms. Lacan will soon find it best to make her way around town unescorted.”

  Amado smiled.

  “Anyway, she’s the big excitement so far this season,” he said, “but I think it’ll be a long summer. The swallows seem to have arrived in greater numbers this year.”

  Chapter 5

  Ross quickly settled into his usual routine when he was in San Rafael. Years ago he had decided to allow the Angelus bells that regulated the mission’s daily life to regulate his own daily routine as well. He deliberately arranged his workdays around their tolling.

  They woke him at six o’clock. He got up, made coffee, and walked to the front gates to get the newspaper. When he came back, he made a light breakfast and took it out to the patio. Sitting on the deep bench of the arbor, he read the paper while he ate breakfast under the bougainvillea. At eight-thirty he took everything back into the kitchen, put away the dishes, filled a thermos with coffee, and walked through the woods to the studio.

  For the next several hours he studied the photographs of Mrs. Beach that had been waiting for him when he arrived from Paris. When the bells tolled at noon, he walked to the house, ate a cold lunch while he listened to a new CD by the tango group Tosca, and then returned to the studio.

  In the afternoon he began sketching from the photographs. He didn’t listen to music while he worked. He preferred the sounds that came in through the doors and windows, which he always kept open: the rasp of cicadas, which could be nearly deafening in the hottest part of the summer, interspersed with the somnolent cooing of mourning doves and the gabby vocal flights of a solitary mockingbird.

  When the bells tolled again at six o’clock, he closed the studio and climbed into his Jeep and drove down Las Lomitas, the narrow lane that ran by the front walls of his property and descended in a series of turns into town. He drove through Denegre Park, a greenbelt with jogging trails shaded by oaks and sycamores that flanked Rio Encinal, and followed the river upstream for nearly a mile before turning onto a smaller street that led to Graber’s.

  Inside the tavern he stopped at the bar to pick up his first bottle of Pacifico before heading back to the patio.

  He wasn’t gregarious, but he liked watching people and listening to them talk. And he liked the parrots that Graber let roam around his jungly patio. Sometimes he and Amado agreed to meet there, but it was a hit-or-miss kind of arrangement. For Ross, this time in late afternoon was simply an opportunity to get away from his own mind for a few hours by turning his attention to other people.

  About half the tables in the sprawling patio were occupied as he made his way to a table near the rock wall just above the river. He sat down, looked for the parrots, and found a couple of them sitting on their perches under a small palm. One of them was staring stupidly at nothing, as still as a painted stone, while the other negotiated his perch like a hapless land animal, falling upside down and trying to right
himself using his strong beak, squawking and screeching and flopping his broad scarlet wings like flailing flags.

  “They’re quite beautiful, aren’t they?”

  He looked around and was surprised to see the woman he had seen here several nights before with Anita Beaton.

  “They can have nasty tempers,” he said to her profile. She was looking at the birds.

  “I’ve heard they can live to be very old.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, studying her. Then she turned to him. “Fifty, sixty years,” he said.

  “I’m Céleste Lacan.” She reached across the table, and they shook hands.

  “Ross Marteau,” he said. Her hand was cool and wet from the bottle of beer she was holding. She stood there, not quite smiling, but looking as though she might.

  “Are you meeting someone?” he asked.

  “No, I just came in . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked around.

  “Would you like to sit down?”

  She glanced at the table.

  He opened his hands. “I’m by myself.”

  He thought she was going to offer an excuse, but then she tilted her head to one side in acquiescence.

  “Thank you,” she said, and before he could stand, she pulled out a chair and sat down. She was as tall as he had judged her to be the night he had seen her, with high hips and almost broad shoulders. Not a fragile woman. He thought of her Scots father. He could see her mother’s blood in her coloring and the structure of her face.

  “I saw you here with Amado Mateos one night, didn’t I?” she asked.

  “Probably.”

  “He’s a very civilized man. I like him.”

  He nodded, took a drink from his bottle. He was staring at her, but most good-looking women were used to it, and he doubted she would be an exception. She had a firm jawline and high cheekbones. Her eyebrows were prominent and dark, and the left one had a small mole at the outside corner. She wore no makeup, perhaps a little mascara.

  “This is a quiet corner,” she said, looking around the patio. “Appropriate for a quiet man, I suppose.”

  In profile her forehead sloped back slightly—another Indian feature—to a low hairline.

  “A quiet man?” he asked.

  She turned back to him. “A hunch.”

  “Mostly it’s just a good place to watch people without having to be involved. It’s a good observing spot.”

  “So you sit here . . . just observing.”

  “Well, I’ve never considered it a ‘just’ sort of activity.”

  She smiled at that, and he saw a trellis of lines at the outside corners of her brown eyes. She was a woman in transition, passing into her early forties and doing it very well indeed.

  “I’ve gotten the feeling that watching other people is a major preoccupation in this town.”

  “Well, San Rafael’s a small place, so newcomers and the summer celebrities attract a lot of attention. We’re easily amused.”

  She sat quite straight, as she had done that first night, her forearms resting on the table as she held her bottle in both hands, looking at him.

  “But aren’t you something of a celebrity yourself?” she asked.

  “This is San Rafael, Texas.” He smiled. “Being a sculptor isn’t high on the wow scale around here.”

  “Well, it is with other people who come here for the summer. Anita says you’re a famous recluse . . . and famously reclusive.”

  “Anita’s going to work herself to exhaustion tending to other people’s business.”

  “I’ve been reading about you,” she said. He thought she was watching for his reaction. Her voice was smooth, in the lower registers. There was an accent, but its vowels and inflections gave confused hints of British English and French and Spanish. It was pleasant to listen to, but unidentifiable.

  “Reading about me?”

  “ARTJournal, American Artist, Art International . . .”

  “Oh, the critics,” he said, tilting his head at her and wondering why she wanted to explore those particular sores. “Well, I won’t disagree with them.”

  She gave him a puzzled frown.

  “That surprise you?”

  “You’re referring to the not-always positive critiques?” she asked.

  “Not-always positive. Those, yes.”

  “What do you mean, you won’t disagree with them?”

  He took a big swallow of beer to stanch the sour taste this subject always left in his mouth. He decided to just meet the issue head-on with her.

  “I used to believe,” he said, “that the only time an art journal bothered to cover my work was when they wanted to illustrate an aesthetic morality tale for their readers. You know, a reminder of what it looks like to sell out. They’re pretty consistent: They usually refer to the ‘enormous potential of his early years,’ and then they examine the mediocrity of my work, and then they offer a few disdainful words about the high fees I ‘demand.’ Often they conclude with a philosophical lament on squandered talent.”

  Another mouthful of beer.

  “After years of this,” he went on, “I decided I needed to be honest with myself, take a long hard look at my career. I began to think, Well, now, there’s a grain of truth in some of this, isn’t there? Maybe more than a grain. I have made compromises, haven’t I? Yeah, sure. I have taken commissions purely for the money, haven’t I, even knowing from the beginning that the client’s going to want something really smarmy? Yeah, sure I have.”

  He didn’t know why he was answering her like this instead of simply shrugging it off with a flippant remark as he had done habitually over the years.

  “Then I had to admit to myself that, really, I had sold out more often than I’d stood my ground. In fact, I’d done it for so long that I finally had to admit to myself that the damn magazines don’t really have it in for me after all. They’re just telling it like it is.”

  She stared at him curiously. He could see it in her face. She seemed to be trying to figure something out. Was she surprised by something? By his stone-cold self-appraisal? By his lack of pride? By his cowardice at not having tried to turn his career around? What?

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t make any excuses for my work. And I don’t pretend that I’m being misunderstood, either,” he added. “I’ve made my choices with both eyes open. I do what I do. They write what they write.”

  One of the parrots shrieked and Céleste flinched, and a bedlam of screeching and whistling and chirruping rolled through the upper stories of the trees as the parakeets and macaws contributed their opinions of the parrot’s comment. When it all died down, there was an awkward silence between the two of them, and the murmur of conversations from the surrounding tables rushed back into the vacuum that he had created by his remarks. He heard someone laugh and smelled the pungent waft of a cigarette.

  She was staring at him, her mouth slightly puckered to one side as she nibbled thoughtfully at the inside of her lower lip. Who knew what she was thinking or what her reasons were in bringing up the unflattering articles? But he didn’t see how she could have done it innocently. Still, she seemed oddly affected by his response. To hell with it. He wanted to move on.

  “Are you in the business, then?” he asked.

  “You mean . . . the art business?”

  “Yes. Is that why you were reading about me?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no. Not at all. I used to be a researcher for Christie’s in London. That’s my background, my university training, art history.”

  “But you don’t do that anymore?”

  “Not since I’ve been married, the last few years. Still, I keep up, casually, with what’s going on. Since I knew I was going to be here for the summer—I’d read about you in the Paris papers during the past year and knew this was your home—I looked up a lot of articles about you.”

  “People do that, I suppose,” he said.

  She sipped from her long-neck bottle, the first taste from it that she had had since she�
�d sat down. He guessed she didn’t really like beer but drank it as an accommodation to the favorite local beverage.

  “You know,” she said, “I really didn’t know . . . how you felt about those articles. I just assumed that sort of thing was something you . . . an artist, shrugged off.”

  For some reason he wanted to believe her. Just like he wanted to believe everything else she said. Why? If she was really as savvy about the art world as she claimed, then she should’ve . . . Oh, to hell with it.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “I will.”

  She was looking at him as if she didn’t believe him. At least he thought that’s what she was thinking.

  “How did you stumble onto Graber’s?” he asked.

  “Anita.”

  “Was that your first time here the other night?”

  “Oh, no. I’d been here a couple of times before.”

  Then, as they looked at each other, there was a quirky and unexpected moment of clarity when he felt as if he saw right into her mind and understood the substance, if not the actual essence, of what she was thinking: She was having second thoughts. About him. What he didn’t have any sense of was what her opinion of him had been in the first place. Though he had no doubt that she was amending a preconception, he had no idea if that was good or bad.

  “I wonder,” she said, still looking at him, “would you mind letting me see your studio sometime?”

  That wasn’t what he had expected to hear.

  “Of course not,” he said. “Anytime.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “Sure. Call me first, though. You’ll need directions . . . and to make sure I’m there.”

  He took a fountain pen from his pocket and lifted his bottle from the round blotter-board coaster on which it had been sitting and wrote his telephone number along the curving edge, away from the wet circle left by his bottle. He gave it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and then she hesitated as if she were about to say something else, something her face implied, entirely different from what they had been talking about. But the moment passed, and her expression softened. “You know . . . it was good of you to ask me to sit down,” she said. She looked at the telephone number on the coaster, and then she looked up at him again. “I’ll leave you to your observations.”