Mount Terminus (18 page)

With each step, Bloom took none of the details composing her body and face for granted, as, other than in books and paintings and sculptures in and around the house, he had never seen a woman fully bared before him. He delighted in the way her small nose sloped at the same angle as her breasts, how the shape of her chin resembled the knobs of her knees, that the color of her lips was a shade darker than that of the broad rings of flesh circling her breasts. Her mouth was the same color as the crenellated flesh between her legs, which she opened for him with a coquette's good humor.

As if in search of sprites and nymphs, he studied with great fascination the sparkling triangle of auburn hair under the small bulge of her stomach. He followed beads of perspiration up from her navel to the notch at the base of her throat, where he paused before gazing for the first time into the powder-blue hydrangeas that were her eyes. It wasn't until he reached this most fragile and intimate of places that he discovered what he was meant to be looking for, and with this discovery of the young woman's inner beauty, the internal pressure one would expect the young Rosenbloom to feel at the sight of such lovely flowers began to mount.

Having no illusions that his subject would miss the ascent of his mood, Bloom retreated a few steps to an armchair sitting beside the camera and tripod Gus had presumably set out. He sat down, and here, in this position, he pressed his hands into his lap, and waited. With a hapless grin, his face aglow, he focused his attention on the young woman's feet. But here, too, he saw in the rise of her instep, in the delicacy of the tendons, a configuration of lines that reminded him of the curve of her hips and the shape of her face, and he returned in his mind to what beauty projected from her eyes. Wherever his thoughts turned now—to the shafts of light, to his birds in the tower, to the limbs of trees hung with fruit—he returned to what lived behind this woman's eyes. When a good amount of time had passed, the young woman—as if she couldn't bear witness to his mortification a moment longer, or perhaps because she had simply grown impatient with the stillness of the room—rolled her eyes to the skylight above, stepped down from the stool, and padded over the wooden planks. There she knelt down between Bloom's knees, placed a finger to her lips, and nodded her head as if they were in agreement. The young Rosenbloom's instinct was to protest, to protect the young woman's integrity, to save her from herself, but with her mouth only inches from the zipper of his pants, with her weighty breasts pressing upon his inner thighs, with the musty aromas rising from under her arms and between her legs, with the expectation he might experience the same levity and release he had felt with Roya, his senses were too overwhelmed to do anything other than nod back his consent, and before he knew it, in a few swift motions, his subject, with whom he had shared less than a dozen words, had undone the fly of his trousers and had taken him into her mouth.

This lush sensation was so unusual to him, he tried to push her away, but she acted possessed—or was at least very intent to do her good work—and not only did she manage to hold Bloom there, but she also overpowered him, outmaneuvered him. She thrust her head forward faster and faster until the young Rosenbloom gave in to her and arched his back, allowed himself to present to his full length, at which point, only then, she slowed, at which point, he, with one hand gripping her long braid and the other hand gripping her ear, gushed, and, to his great pleasure, felt the unique sensation of her nibbling away at him with her fang as she drank down every last drop of the very same substance that had landed in his navel so unceremoniously months before.

*   *   *

Now that the coil within Bloom had been unraveled, he was able to concentrate on what had been asked of him. The young woman daintily touched a finger to the corners of her mouth and returned to the stool, her braid coming undone, her lips spread in a mischievous grin, her eyes glowing as if electrified. Bloom wrapped around her shoulders his mother's paisley shawl and he gathered the tripod and the motion picture camera whose lens he set back a small distance from her shoulder. Look away from me, he said to her. Look over your other shoulder, he commanded, and when I say so, slowly turn to me with your eyes shut. When your chin touches this shoulder, slowly open them, and look at me the way you're looking at me right now.

He focused the lens on the back of her head and began turning the camera's crank.

And begin, he said.

And she began.

*   *   *

In the days he waited for his brother's return, the young Rosenbloom's education in inner beauty continued in this way. Every morning, Gus appeared beside his bed to announce the arrival of a new subject, and with each new arrival, Bloom now walked to the studio on his own, eager to see what type of woman awaited him; as every one Gus brought to the estate varied in size and shape and had such different features and temperaments, Bloom's ideas of physical and psychic beauty were constantly changing, and he began to understand the nature of his brother's exercise. He became, in this brief time, a great admirer of women, of all women, whether they were classically beautiful in balance and symmetry, or enormously imbalanced, with urn-sized breasts that hung to oversized waists. All forms, he found, appealed to him. Ever since his first experience in the studio, he particularly appreciated women with imperfect teeth. He found himself particularly aroused by one woman whose front two were substantially gapped. Because of the duality he observed in the face of another woman on another day, he thought women with high cheekbones and high foreheads were much more becoming if included in the composition of their faces was a small overbite. In profile, he was left with the impression that the woman was awkward and shy, but when he walked around her and looked at her directly, she appeared appealingly predatory. Gus introduced him to women who had peculiarly exaggerated physiognomies. A woman with a thin face and an aquiline nose. A woman with a large mouth full of oversized teeth. A woman with a narrow torso and wide hips. A woman with rolls and folds of flesh that lapped over her God-given curves. And he discovered, when he rolled the film over in the camera, he was more intrigued by the faces of these women, especially the shapeliest of the lot. The women with strong thighs and muscular rumps, those with hefty bellies and breasts, with broad shoulders and thick wrists. These women, unlike the women undistinguished in their shapeliness, didn't retreat to invisible and mysterious places in their minds. They didn't deflect the cold gaze of the lens. Rather, as one would reflect outward onto the night sky, they appeared to be searching for meaning in its darkness. In a few frames of film, Bloom discovered, a shapely woman, uninhibited, could reveal in an instant the full essence of her character, and to this he was drawn in, so closely, he was compelled to turn away.

*   *   *

The women departed with Gus each morning at precisely eleven o'clock, and he would return just before two with a man who possessed an unusual talent. The object here, Gus said, is to capture the character behind the thrill of the event. He arrived first with a one-eyed Negro cowboy dressed in spurs and chaps. A scar like the tail of a rattlesnake curved down his cheek, ending near the opening of his ear. Like Gus, he wore a bowler hat, only his had two bullet holes on each side and had tucked into the band of its brim a mottled peacock feather. At his waist was a holster holding two six-shooters and in his right hand he held a rifle with a pewter finish. The sight of the man, who stood as tall and wide and as taciturn as Gus, frightened Bloom, until the cowboy walked into the grove and plucked from their respective trees an orange, then a lemon, an avocado, a plum. He handed them to Bloom and together they walked to the open field, some distance from the headland, and there the man pointed to the sky. Throw them all up, one after the next, real fast like, as high as you can, he said. Bloom looked to Gus and Gus said, Do as he says. Bloom readied himself and then, starting with the largest of the fruit, he threw them up in quick succession as hard as he could. Avocado. Orange. Lemon. Plum. As the avocado rose to its apex, the one-eyed cowboy drew each of his pistols and shot each piece of fruit out of the sky, the plum just as it started its descent. He then turned to Bloom and smiled, showing him where he'd lost his two front teeth. My wife smacked 'em right out o' my head. He laughed when he saw Bloom innocently gazing through the gap into the back of his mouth. Bloom spent the afternoon filming the cowboy's face in the afternoon light. Straight on. In profile. Close up, to take in the detail of his scar. He rolled film to capture the way he walked with his hands at rest on his pistol grips. From a distance he filmed him plucking fruit from trees. From up close he filmed his dark hand reaching up to grasp hold of a lemon. Lying on his back, he focused on the point in the sky where he could best capture the exploding fruit. At his side, he filmed the cowboy drawing his gun. From the front, from the back, from every angle he could think of to re-create that one moment in time, Bloom rolled and rolled the film in the magazine, until there was no more film to be rolled. And off went the one-eyed Negro cowboy sharpshooter with two missing teeth as the sun began to dip below the horizon.

In the days to come, Gus drove up to the top of Mount Terminus a Chinese dwarf who spun miniature plates at the end of bamboo poles, a dozen of them, simultaneously; a mustached, one-armed Greek who juggled five baseballs at a time with his one good arm, his shoulder, and a foot; a strongman who wrestled a wild pig; a team of Russian acrobats who formed atop a single bicycle a reverse pyramid; a lazy-eyed magician who failed to make Gus disappear; a six-foot-tall contortionist who squeezed into a small box from which he couldn't remove himself; and then there were several dipsomaniacs Gus plied with drink so Bloom could film them stumble about through the maze of the knotted gardens until they could stumble no more.

*   *   *

Except to say that Sam Freed had given him a chance at a new life after he'd fallen on hard times, Gus Levy shared little about his past. Yet Bloom felt at ease in his company. He trusted him. Inherently. Even if he was dressed as one of the henchmen from his childhood nightmares, he didn't resemble his father's tormentors. There was warmth and an innate kindness belying Gus's exterior. Even Mr. Stern, who had stopped by several times to advise Bloom on his holdings, took a liking to Gus. Despite his monumental presence, Gus, a man of his father's generation, more often than not struck Bloom as a small boy wearing an oversized suit. When he didn't know he was being observed, Bloom caught him on several occasions burying the tip of his proboscis in a rosebud to take in not a manly snort, but more a feminine whiff. Not long after he arrived, he carried with him—inside the internal pocket of his long coat—a pair of pruning shears, which he used for several purposes. Once, sometimes twice a week, while Bloom filmed his subjects, he would ask Meralda for a vase or a bowl and would clip flowers or fruit, and present them to her at sunset. On the days he wasn't arranging flowers in a vase or fruit in a bowl, he trimmed back branches in the grove, so they produced healthier fruit, he told Bloom. To occupy his time further, he lumbered up to the top of the tower, where he did as his young charge did: observed the world about them through the eye of the telescope. Communed with the birds. He even went so far as to take with him a bucket of water and a brush to clean the cages. What Bloom liked about him best of all, however, was the respect he showed the guests he delivered to the estate. No matter what variety of woman he met at the door of the studio, after Bloom had finished with her, Gus bowed his head, handed a yellow rose to her, and offered his arm for the walk back to the motorcar. To the one-eyed cowboy, to the one-armed Greek, to the dipsomaniacs who could hardly stand upright, Bloom was introduced as if they were respectable gentlemen. To the most unusual of the lot, he treated their differences with the nonchalance of a man who had experienced the world enough to know when to shrug his bulky shoulders at its most intriguing peculiarities.

*   *   *

One night after Gus had twice been to town and back, Roya appeared before Bloom in the parlor and touched his shoulder. He followed her out the front door and down the drive. When they reached the gate, she handed Bloom a flashlight and pointed to the right, along the stone wall. Bloom turned on the light and there he saw Gus's black sedan, and in it, Gus, snoozing upright with a shotgun's double barrel resting against his chest. Bloom approached and woke him. And said, Won't you come inside, Gus? There are more than enough rooms. Or, if you like, you can sleep in one of the cottages.

I can't, said Gus. Simon wouldn't like it.

Why not?

I'm supposed to be looking out.

What for?

He grimaced. It's nothing you need to concern yourself with.

You're hugging a shotgun, Gus.

The big man looked down at the two barrels in his arms, raised his thick brows as if to say, So I am, then said, Walk around and take a seat.

Bloom did as he was told, and when he was settled next to Gus, Gus said, Simon's told you of his plans? For the reservoir and the aqueduct?

Yes.

Well, the farmers up there near the lake haven't been in a particularly obliging mood. They sort of have it out for him at the moment. And seeing as it was Mr. Rosenbloom, the departed, who turned the lake's stewardship over to Simon, I'm afraid they're not too pleased with you, by association, see.

No, said Bloom, I don't see.

Look, said Gus, it's like this. You've got the farmers out at the edge of the desert there who aren't too pleased because they say the people down south are going to suck the water right out of their fields, and then you've got the citrus farmers over here on the other side of the mountains, he said, pointing out to the basin, who've yet to sell to Simon—they're not too pleased with the amount of money Simon's offered them for their groves. They feel like they're getting squeezed. They consider the way your brother does business something of an injustice. But the thing is, the courts have said it's Simon's right, and it's the water authority's right, to divert the water from the farms in the north, and put the squeeze on the farmers in the south, and it's the courts, in the end, that say what's what. So, said Gus, it's no surprise tempers are up, and, it's been my experience, when tempers run hot, right minds don't prevail. It doesn't matter whether or not you're part of Simon's venture, see? When people think their livelihood is threatened, anyone will do. Until now there have been whispers about some unpleasant business, nothing more than whispers; nevertheless, Simon wants me here to sit out the nights. As a precaution.