Gibbon's Decline and Fall (21 page)

She dropped her arms and stepped away. The girl, released, turned toward the worktable and regarded her clay image from beneath drowsy lids.

“When it's finished, will you put my name on it?”

Faye blinked, ran her fingers across her close-cropped hair, and restrained a shiver. “Why, sure.”

“So's my boyfriend can see it. You won't tell him about … you know.”

“About my making love to you, Petra? I'd say that's private.”

“Just so's I could get my expression right. A nepisode.”

An episode, yes. And Petra's expression had been absolutely right. Blinded. Lost in eroticism. Totally unaware of the world and all its fragile wonder. Exactly what Faye had wanted for this particular figure. Though she had to admit that artistic intuition had been adulterated by curiosity. The episode had not been only to get Petra's facial expression right. Faye had also wondered if she herself was still capable of feeling anything, if that body, that lovely, nubile body, could stir her. In her mind and heart she was faithful to one and only one love, but from time to time over the years her body had longed for the feel of real flesh. Or had done so in the past. How long past? She couldn't even remember!

Stroking Petra's sleek body, she had felt no lust. Seeing those beautifully rounded haunches rotating slowly, that perfect skin glossy with excitement, she'd felt none. Nothing. She had not felt it, as she had not really felt anything in some time. She presumed it was because of what the doctors had told her. She had not asked specifically about libido. When one is talking about life, lust seems relatively unimportant.

Petra said, “You'll put my name on it, and the title. Springtime. That's what I want.”

Faye nodded soberly. Springtime was one way of putting
it. There were more accurate titles: burgeoning life, heedless reproduction, the luxuriant wastage that went with mindless fecundity. Petra would not understand those meanings.

“I wish Narcisso could see it,” she murmured. “It looks sexy.”

Give the girl a gold star. “Narcisso would like it?”

“Yeah. Maybe he better not, though. I don't want him to know about … you know. Because when you did that, it wasn't really me. I'm not that way about girls.”

Faye sighed dismissively. “Well, girl, I know that. I know you just want to get married and have lots and lots of babies.” Petra was one of eight. Narcisso had half a dozen brothers. Whether they could support them or not, they would have a brood. What else?

Abruptly, the girl's face clouded, tears swam in her eyes.

“Petra? What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Let me alone.”

“People don't get all red-eyed over nothing. What is it?”

The face confronting her hardened, lost its adolescent naïveté, became a woman's face, angry and uncompromising.

“I said nothing. It's my business. It's private. Let me alone.” She looked at the studio clock. “Cisso, he'll be here for me soon.”

Faye gritted her teeth and turned back to the window. Damn. Now the face was all wrong. Well, let it be. Faye could remember the emotion, and often it was easier to work from the emotion, letting the model go. Sometimes the vision was clearer without the banality that personified it.

“You go ahead and get dressed; we'll say that's enough for today.” She went to the sink for damp cloths to shroud the maquette. On the way back she stopped, caught afresh by a different angle of view, the lines of the work, the surge and inevitability of it. Good. Oh, it was good. That upreaching arm, clutching toward heaven, trying to grasp all sensation, all at once. That spread-legged, arched-back, abandoned form carried aloft on the great wave. Even the beginnings of the face were good, that openmouthed, half-lidded gaze, turned inward, seeing nothing.

Petra redid her eyes and slipped into her panties and the knit dress in which she'd arrived. She looked more naked as she dressed herself than when she'd been unclothed, writhing like a stripper, smoothing the dress over her bust and hips, slipping into her high-heeled sandals. As a last ritual she
leaned back to stick out her tongue at the life-size bronze that was hidden behind the screen.

“When you want me next?” she asked, posed, one hip provocatively outthrust.

“I'll call you,” Faye answered, trying not to sound peevish. The bronze had not merited the disrespect.

The girl shrugged and sashayed out, bottom swinging, banging the door behind her. It took real effort to bang the studio door, but Petra managed it every time. Faye opened the door quietly, went out onto the little landing, and stood looking down the winding wooden steps to the graveled driveway where the red car stood, orange and yellow flames painted on the hood and along the sides, clearly visible even in this evening light. “Scorcher,” it said on the doors. Beside the driver's door stood a youth who matched the car, completely true to type: the hair, the studded jacket, the studied slouch, the smoke pouring from his nostrils. He looked up at her from hooded eyes, his lips bent into a masterful sneer, flipping the cigarette away in a shower of sparks. Gravel spat from the spinning wheels as Scorcher went away, the engine noise fading and returning, fading and returning as it traversed the switchbacks among the pines.

Faye went down and found the smoldering cigarette near a pile of tinder-dry needles, angrily stubbing it out and burying it under a stone. This wasn't the first time he'd damned near started a fire. Perhaps Petra should find a new job! Or a new boyfriend.

The last of the car noise was gone when she returned to the studio. As though startled by the silence, the lights brightened, the sensor that controlled them responding to the decrease in daylight. Faye turned them off before drawing a plastic bag over the shrouded maquette. Tomorrow she'd finish the face and start on the fruit of those fecund loins, the flood of children. The maquette was due in August. She wouldn't get the go-ahead on the full project until the model was approved.

Anxiety came in a wave, making her shudder. They had to approve it. She needed the money. With all these medical bills mounting up and up … Oh, she needed the money, but that wasn't all she needed. Added to the formless longing of childhood was a mature longing of her own. She wanted to be great! Not for notoriety or fame, but only to do something, even if it was only one thing, that was fine. The goal was
within reach, she knew it, she could feel it, but she needed time and she might not have enough time. She'd never been in love with anyone but Sophy. She'd never had any hobbies or demands except music and her art. She'd given up all commitments, all relationships—or they'd given her up. Mother and sisters still believed she'd chosen what she was, still believed she could choose otherwise. Faye had even considered giving up the DFC, except they were all she had now, and she needed them.

Despite the pressure, she was too tired to do anything more tonight. She was out of power. She needed a recharge, a few hours of nothing-ing, a night to read a little, something well loved and easy. A night to listen to music and recover her sense of herself. She would walk across the porch to the kitchen and take the bottle of chilled wine out of the refrigerator. She would sit in her sunset window, quietly, purposefully not thinking about the doctors, turning off the phone so Herr Straub could not call her to argue, yet again, that she should resign the commission. Herr Straub was persistent as a tick and as wounding as a stampede. After each of his assaults, her confidence sank another notch. She didn't need Herr Straub to question her ability; she could do that herself.

As she turned to go, she was stopped by the presence in the corner. Petra must have moved the screen, for the bronze stood in silhouette against the north window, the line of the shoulder, the outheld hand, the head, ever so slightly cocked, as though listening to something.

“Shall I bring you some wine, love?” she asked, her voice breaking slightly. “We could have a little wine, a little music.”

Her hand went to the light switch, only to stop there, frozen, for there was a sound in the room, a murmur as though a distant door had opened and let through a hint of some faraway clamor. It could have been the wind, murmuring in the air ducts, but it wasn't. Slightly, very slightly, the figure in the corner turned its head, regarded her thoughtfully, then moved, twisted, became smoke, became fog, became nothing.

Faye cried out, in surprise as much as fear, thrusting herself against the door. “Sophy!”

There was nothing there. There could have been nothing there. She turned the lights up full; then tentatively, step by step, she went to the edge of the screen and peered around it.
There, totally hidden from the room, the statue of a nude Sophy stood, dusty and unchanged.

It had been a trick of the light.

She knew it hadn't been a trick of the light. She sat down, losing herself, not thinking at all. There she sat, waiting, just waiting, for something terrible or wonderful to happen. She couldn't even make herself worry over which it might be.

I
N THE GROUND-FLOOR CHAPEL
at the Abbey of St. Clare, Reverend Mother Agnes McGann knelt alone before the altar. Behind the altar stood a triptych, the center panel painted with the risen Christ. To the left was a cool Creation, a leafy wilderness in which God Almighty was assisted in his labors by a swarm of officious angels. To the right was the Last Judgment, the same angels thrusting the damned off the cliffs of eternity. The painter's name was writ large upon the center panel. Faye had looked him up for Aggie, somebody Andrews, died in the early 1900s. Definitely second-rate, if that, said Faye. Agnes, eyes drawn irresistibly to the right-hand panel, where she searched for her own face among the damned, comforted herself with Faye's last judgment on the artist.

Around her the abbey buzzed quietly, a hive almost at rest. Upstairs the sisters were getting themselves ready for bed with much attendant rustling and water noises: Toilets flushing, basins draining, showers running. Careful footsteps. Doors closing gently. Even the decorous rustle of ankle-length cotton nightgowns, assumed if not heard from this distance. There would be no talk until tomorrow after mass. Though the order was not enclosed, though it included among its members many women who had at one time been quite worldly, silence was still observed from evensong until breakfast, the vow of
obedience was still enjoined, the vow of chastity was considered paramount.

Until recently Reverend Mother Agnes had thought she had managed obedience and poverty quite well, though she acknowledged that the true fulfillment of celibacy had eluded her. Sophy, whose hand she had never held beyond a momentary greeting, whose cheek she had never pressed except to bid hello or farewell, had often haunted her dreams in intimate, erotic detail. To delay if not to eliminate this nightly occurrence, Reverend Mother Agnes McGann had formed the habit of coming each evening to ask God's protection against her subconscious. The dreams were no doubt a test of her character and spirituality, for though she had lusted for Sophy, she had always been chaste, always loved Sophy celibately despite her passion. Which didn't accrue to Agnes's credit, of course, since that was the only way Sophy allowed herself to be loved.

Faye loved Sophy, too, of course. Faye always had. There was no point in Agnes's being jealous over that. Faye had been just as frustrated in that love as Agnes had been. As Aggie was! Her feelings should have changed after what she had seen in San Francisco, but they hadn't. No matter her mental confusion, her love for Sophy remained intransigent.

“If one witnesses an act that might be sinful, Father Girard?” She knew the answer, but she needed it confirmed.

“Might be sinful?”

Was it a sin? Had it been frightening, as Agnes had thought at the time? Frightening and weird and perhaps diabolical? Or had Agnes herself been hallucinating and the act harmless? “Maybe meant as a joke, but perhaps with serious implications, Father.” Anguished attempts at explanation would only confuse the issue. She knew what Father would say.

He said it, throwing in a kindly chuckle as lagniappe. “Aren't you being overscrupulous? All these
maybes
and
perhapses?
God can decide what a sin is, Reverend Mother. Leave it to Him. Meantime, why don't you pray for the soul of the person involved and any who may have been sinned against? That way you'll cover all the bases.”

She had already prayed for Sophy, assuming Sophy needed praying for, though she'd felt guilty doing even that. Who was she to say Sophy needed her prayers? Perhaps Sophy had done what she had to prevent a greater sin. But, then, there'd been all the rest of it, the part she'd never told anyone
because she didn't know whether to believe it herself. If she told Father Girard, he would think she was a few crayfish short of a gumbo, he really would. There was probably a simple explanation, if Sophy were still here to make an explanation.