Animosity Page 5

  “Sure. Is she here, in San Rafael, too?”

  “She will be in a few days. She’ll be staying the summer with me.”

  She hesitated, and this time he could see her carefully considering what she would say next.

  “Leda and I have different fathers,” she said. “When Eva—my mother—and I moved to Europe after my father’s death, I was old enough by then to be on my own, and I returned to London where I’d been in school. Eva finally settled in Rome.” She paused. “Eva was an exotic woman. Dramatic. She was like nectar to certain kinds of men. Always the wrong kinds.”

  Her hastily wrapped chignon began slipping from its moorings, and she absently reached up with one hand and prodded it back in place with fingers that instinctively knew the maneuvers. It was a thoughtless reflex, a universally feminine motion.

  “One day I went to Rome for the holidays and discovered that Eva had had a baby. It was only a few months old. Leda. Eva had hired a nurse and was going on with her life. I don’t think she even knew who the father was.”

  Céleste looked down at her hands in her lap, thinking. He wondered how she was deciding what she would tell him and what she wouldn’t. Why would she select one word rather than another, why this phrase rather than that one?

  “I didn’t feel any attachment to this child,” she said, looking up, straight at him. “Or any affection. And I didn’t want any part of the kind of life that she represented. I fled back to London and that was that. For the next dozen years I saw them only rarely. That was fine with Eva, who didn’t really want a younger woman—and potential rival—hanging around complicating her affairs.

  “When Leda was fifteen Eva sent her away to school, as she had me. Switzerland. When Leda finished school she stayed on in Geneva for university. Eva didn’t make her feel any more welcome in Rome than she had me, and was glad to pay her to stay away. She was in her last year in university—about three years ago—when Eva decided to drive to Switzerland to see her for the Christmas holidays. She and the man she had taken with her were both killed in a car crash in northern Italy.”

  Again the chignon began to come apart. Irritated, she started taking it down while she went on talking, removing hairpins and combing her fingers through her falling hair.

  “When Eva’s will was settled I was astonished to discover that she’d made me Leda’s legal guardian. I would have that responsibility for another four years. It wasn’t a situation that either of us liked.”

  Céleste paused and toyed with one of her hairpins.

  He didn’t know where any of this was going, but he was discovering that he would rather watch and listen to Céleste than just about anything else he could think of. Her accent was delightfully interesting and pleasant.

  “Have you ever been a model?” she asked suddenly.

  He shook his head. “Well, maybe a few times, for friends. Years ago in school.”

  “For busts. Portraits.”

  “Yeah, sure. We all did that for each other when we couldn’t afford models.”

  “But you’ve never taken off your clothes.”

  “No, never done that.”

  “Well, that’s another matter altogether, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so. You say that as though you’ve done a good bit of it.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “You didn’t like it much.”

  “Oh, but I did. I more than liked it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was satisfying.” She hesitated a beat. “It’s not an insignificant thing to do.”

  She spoke as if there were something mystical about it. He’d known a lot of models over the years, but he sure as hell hadn’t known any mystics among them. For the most part, they were pretty earthy women.

  “The point is,” Céleste went on, “Leda wants to do this more than anything else in the world, but I have serious reservations about it.”

  “Why?”

  There was a little pucker at one corner of her mouth as she thought, but the expression in her eyes was impenetrable.

  “Tell me,” she asked, “have you ever done anything of which you are profoundly ashamed?”

  Jesus. She could go off in some strange directions. He didn’t know anyone who was such an engaging mixture of plain speaking and surprise.

  “Oh, I think everyone has done something at some time in their lives tha—”

  “No, no,” she interrupted, “nothing glib. That’s not what I’m talking about. I said ‘profoundly’ ashamed.”

  It was a hell of a question.

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “You ‘can’t’ say—”

  “A figure of speech,” he said. “No, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything of which I was profoundly ashamed.”

  She gave him a disturbing smile that wasn’t a smile but took the shape of one, as if she had caught him in a lie. Then she shrugged as if to dismiss it all and changed directions again.

  “Mr. Marteau—”

  “Let’s drop that, okay?”

  She paused, then continued, but without using his name at all. “Leda doesn’t fully understand what she’s doing here, and I think she could be making a serious mistake.”

  “I thought you were trying to get this done for her?”

  “She’s going to do it with my ‘help’ or without it. I’ll sign the check. That’s my job. But I don’t see any reason to ignore the risks, either.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “Not about posing nude, no.” Her eyes were dark, the pupil lost in the iris. “My fear is that Leda will never be nude. She’ll always be naked—in your eyes, and in her eyes. And certainly in the eyes of everyone who will look at the sculpture.”

  He was beginning to feel that Céleste viewed everything through a lens that provided her with a perspective that was not only uniquely her own, but also completely off the charts of behavioral norms. He would be making a mistake if he ever presumed to believe he could anticipate how she would feel about anything.

  “I’m not trying to be obscure or evasive,” she said. “Actually, my problem is that I want to say more than I should.”

  This last remark was colored by sadness or regret or longing, he really couldn’t tell, but the edge of discontent was unmistakable. The relationship between the two sisters was not a simple one.

  “I imagine this is rather more about us than you would’ve liked to know.”

  “But these are things you wanted me to know, aren’t they?”

  He wanted somehow to put the conversation on a different footing. He was beginning to feel that he was being manipulated, though he couldn’t really say how or to what end. But he wasn’t too comfortable with it.

  “It must seem that way,” she said.

  “It does.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t make too much of that,” she said. “Sometimes I simply talk too much.”

  “I doubt that. I don’t think you say much that you don’t intend to say.”

  The light between them was softening. Her face was somber now, which he felt odd about. It was as if she were making arrangements for a funeral.

  She reached out, her arm penetrating the light, and laid the twig of oak leaves on the deep windowsill.

  “Then I’ll just call you,” she said, “when Leda’s ready to talk.”

  It was late in the afternoon when they finally reached this point, and he asked her if she would like to stay for a drink. But she made an excuse that sounded like an excuse, and she didn’t bother to make it sound like anything else. He walked out to her car with her, and she left.

  That night after he ate dinner and cleaned up the kitchen, he went into the sunroom and put on a Miles Davis CD. He turned off the lights, lay down on the sofa, and kicked off his shoes. As he looked out from the dark to the small lights around the patio, his mind wandered to Céleste. He had never been so entertainingly finessed. Yet in the end, somehow, he didn’t feel manipulated at all. Or maybe he di
d, but he just didn’t mind.

  When he woke the room was silent. It was after two o’clock. The timer had turned off the patio lights, and everything was blue black, with highlights of indigo. He got up, turned off the CD player, and walked down the corridor to his bedroom. He undressed and got into bed. He tried not to think of her anymore.

  Chapter 8

  For the next three days he worked steadily on the Beach project, filling several sketchbooks with studies of poses, working his way toward a decision about how best to present Mrs. Beach’s wonderful proportions.

  Amado had gone to New York for a week with a friend who had “a lovely back,” so Ross hadn’t seen him since Céleste showed up at Graber’s and then at his studio.

  In the afternoons after he’d finished in the studio he worked on the grounds, trimming dead wood out of the trees and bundling the trimmings in neat piles to be hauled away. In the evenings he dawdled through his art books. He had missed his books during the year he’d been in Paris, and he was enjoying revisiting his old favorites.

  And every night he resisted the temptation to call Céleste.

  On the morning of the fourth day he was fine-tuning a sketch on the drawing board when the telephone rang. It was Céleste.

  After they exchanged a few pleasantries, she said, “Leda came in early yesterday morning. She’s caught up on her jet lag now, and she’s eager to meet you. When is a good time for us to come over?”

  “Make it easy on yourself,” he said.

  “This afternoon?”

  “Sure.”

  “Three o’clock?”

  “Fine.”

  The afternoon was bright and warm and still. The cicadas were raising a din in the woods surrounding the studio. He had ordered a small load of limestone blocks from a quarry north of Austin, with the intention of trying his hand on some small sculptures just to stay in practice with stone. His last four major commissions had been in clay. The blocks had arrived that morning—but only a partial load, the rest would be delivered in a couple of days—and were stacked under an oak tree between the studio and the kiln shed.

  He had gone out to inspect them and had just stepped back into the studio when he heard footsteps on the stones of the courtyard. He turned toward the open door as the silhouettes of the two women filled the panel of light.

  “Ross?”

  “Yes, come in,” he said, wiping off the chalky limestone dust from his hands with a rag from one of the workbenches. He squinted at the bright backlighting behind the silhouettes of the two approaching women.

  “This is Leda,” Céleste said as the girl extended her hand to him. He was concentrating on her face, anticipating the symmetrical features he had seen in the photograph. And there they were, emerging as his eyes adjusted to the contrasting light. Reality surpassed the image in the photograph. She was exquisite.

  As he took Leda’s hand she said, “I’m happy to meet you,” in the same softly accented English as Céleste’s, and he felt something oddly out of balance in her handshake. Leda was smiling at him, but he was instantly aware that it was a complicated smile. There was more to it than a simple, affable expression. Her eyes were penetrating and anticipatory, and he realized that she was watching for his reaction. And then he sensed it before he understood it: The beautiful young woman before him was not entirely beautiful.

  He felt Céleste looking at him, too, but he didn’t take his eyes off Leda. While he still held her hand, she turned her shoulder slightly, allowing him to see the swollen convexity in the curvature of her spine, the buffalo hump of a hunchback.

  Jesus.

  “It was my idea,” Leda said quickly, “keeping this from you. I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me at all if you knew.”

  Stunned, he continued to hold her hand. Suddenly he was furious that they had done this, that he had been made the butt of their deception.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” Leda said with the flat practicality of someone used to dealing with the radical reaction her appearance caused in others.

  When she tried to withdraw her hand, he held on to it. She tried to pull away again, but he continued to hold her. Her brow creased with uncertainty, then alarm.

  The expression on her face jolted him again, wrenching his reaction in the opposite direction as he instantly realized that his shock, his very speechlessness, was an insult to her, a confirmation of her freakishness. His anger collapsed into embarrassment. And fascination.

  He released her hand suddenly, too suddenly.

  “Sorry,” he said. He hesitated. “Okay, then . . . you want to talk. Let’s sit over here.”

  He gestured toward his old leather armchair and an uncomfortable Victorian settee with threadbare upholstery. He couldn’t imagine what she was going to say, but he remembered Céleste’s concern. Jesus, he understood now. Her fears about how Leda’s sculpture would be viewed were unquestionably justified. A nude sculpture of this young woman would most likely create a curiosity in the viewer that was not unlike the curiosity that drew people into a carnival sideshow.

  “I know this is a surprise,” Leda said, turning toward the settee.

  As she stepped by him he saw that the dorsal hump was canted to one side and was surprisingly acute, rising sharply from the horizontal midline of her shoulders. He also noticed that there was something askew with her pelvis as well, though she had no trouble at all walking or moving about. But there was a crablike motion to some of her maneuvering, a result he guessed of the effort she had to make at all times to maintain her balance.

  “Céleste warned me that this would be a mistake,” she said, sitting down on the settee. She had to sit forward, midway to the edge of the seat, and quickly and expertly slanted her legs and crossed her ankles in a certain way to achieve a kind of grace, the result of years of necessity and practice.

  “I’m sorry if I was . . . awkward,” he said, waiting for Céleste to take her seat beside Leda before he sat in the old leather club chair.

  Seeing the two sisters side by side was remarkable. Céleste lounged back into her corner of the settee and crossed her long legs at the knee, making them seem even longer, her whole appearance and manner a stark contrast to her sister’s lumpish perch.

  The disharmony of Leda’s stunning face and her tortured physique was, he had to admit to himself, a second incongruous image in this disturbing dyad and was morbidly intriguing. Her face alone would demand a double take anywhere. And then the realization that this extraordinary face was connected to a severely distorted body, which in itself would have attracted stares, too, demanded yet another double take.

  Almost simultaneously it struck him what a disturbing effect this aesthetic confusion must have had on this young woman’s life. The psychological turmoil must have been indescribable, if, indeed, it still wasn’t.

  “There’s really nothing very much to elaborate on,” Leda began. Her voice had the clear quality of youth. “Simply put: I want a nude, full-body sculpture. I want it to be a literal representation. No subtle glossing, just reproduce what you see in front of you.”

  He cut his eyes at Céleste. She was placid, her expression open, waiting. He looked back at Leda.

  “I’m not going to insult you by asking if you’ve thought this through,” he said, “but could you go over some of that with me?”

  “Some of what?”

  “Why you want to do this.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Does that matter?”

  “If I’m going to do this, it matters a lot.”

  “To you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I don’t tell you?”

  “It’s not a challenge. It’s only a question.”

  “What if I lie to you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know that, would I?”

  She stared at him a moment as if to consider whether she thought him worthy of a further explanation. Clearly Leda didn’t have a frail ego. He didn’t have to work very hard to surmise that living with the fre
akish physical combination of her unique body had been the major influence shaping her personality. That and living with—or rather being rejected by—the radically selfish Eva. Whether she was mature beyond her years, or merely bitter beyond her years, remained to be seen.

  “I’m all too well aware,” she began slowly, “of my strangeness, of the effect this body has on people.”

  She paused, but not from uncertainty. Rather, she seemed quite relaxed about it, but not without some near-the-surface passion.

  “Every day of my life,” she said, “is lived in the reflection of other people’s reaction to me. I have to deal with that in every face I see. No exceptions. Ever. How do people react to you? You’re not even aware of a reaction, are you? Well, I can never enjoy that kind of oblivion. I see them stealing looks at me, then turning away when our eyes meet. When someone is forced to confront me—in the case of a sales clerk, for instance—they’re so intent on not looking at my hump that their eyes virtually lock on to mine in a kind of stupid, unblinking startle.”

  She considered something a moment, her eyes going distant in thought.

  “You know,” she continued, “I’ve read articles, feminist rants, about the debasing act of ‘the male gaze.’” She glanced at Céleste. “She and I both studied art history. Useless degrees for the most part, but it’s good for the intellect, and you learn about culturally vital things like ‘the male gaze.’ Anyway, being something of an authority on the idea of ‘the gaze,’ I can say this much. . . .” Her beautiful mouth turned down in a caustic sneer. “I’ll take the male gaze. Oh, yes, please, I’ll suffer that, and they can have the look I’m familiar with, the gaze of repulsed curiosity—the involuntary stare reserved for the queerly disfigured.” She stopped. “There are indignities,” she said, “and then there are cruelties.”

  He cut his eyes at Céleste and found her staring back at him with a blank expression that conveyed nothing at all. When he looked again at Leda, she was waiting for him.

  “So . . . you see,” she went on, like a teacher addressing a pupil for whom she had been waiting to return from a momentary daydream, “the thing is, I know that people wonder what I look like underneath my clothes. ‘What does she look like there? Is she “normal” . . . here?’ Well, I want you to show them. I want you to be their eyes for me.”