“Portraits?” Celine passed a VW Vanagon with Minnesota plates and mountain bikes and the young couple smiled and waved—camper to camper. Celine waved back. Midwesterners were so friendly.
“There is an archive of some two hundred nudes he took of Amana. And dozens of portraits—just a face, hands, ears, the back of her head. As I said, she was very beautiful. Dozens more shots of her arranging flowers. She was a master at flower arrangement, an art she learned from friends of Japanese ancestry when she was studying in São Paulo.”
“Hmm.” Celine was traveling now, he could see it. When she got caught up in a story she let her imagination range in much the way Pete did early in the morning. Their minds were quite different—very—in how they approached a problem: He was analytical. She could be, too, but she trusted most her intuition, her sense of smell, which were almost infallible. She saw the peculiar, the motive no one else could see, the odd touch of grace; he followed the trend lines of certain behaviors, the probabilities of effects leading to further causes. But they both thought creatively and let their imaginations roam.
“I know a little about her, too, you know,” Celine said.
Pete raised one bushy eyebrow.
“While you were cheating on me with your sources, I called Cece. Remember, she lived in the Richmond District and sent her son to the French American School? We often talked in those early days, because Saint Ann’s was just starting, too. She said Amana came to a parents’ meeting. It had to be her—a stunning Brazilian with green eyes, very reserved, with a daughter in second grade. Everyone was excited about this experiment in education. The feeling was that they were giving the benefit of the doubt to their children, to an extent that perhaps had not been tried before, while also giving them a fully cross-cultural education. They would all share in the excitement of them revealing themselves, while at the same time immersing them in French language and culture and being careful to train them in the expected disciplines—math, science, history, English.”
“And she remembered her?” Pete leaned forward. His interest, too, was piqued.
“She remembers that she sat very straight.”
“And?”
“She had a vivid picture of the sweep of her dark hair. It was all of a piece, like a curve of the richest wood. She seemed like that—almost sculptural. Very refined. And Cece thought she detected a nearly concealed skepticism. Her education, of course, would have been the polar opposite of what was then being celebrated.”
“Anything else?”
Celine shook her head. “Not really. She had green eyes, as I said, and she was very quiet. She doesn’t remember her saying more than two words. She remembers a smile. Shy but sincere. Some kind of purity there. It struck Cece that she was one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen. Not just her looks but her bearing, the hint of what one saw inside when she smiled. She must have died a few months after that meeting.”
They drove in silence for a minute or two, ruminating probably on the resounding properties of fate. They were in the open-range country north of Denver, running parallel to the mountains off to their left, the piled ranges of Rocky Mountain National Park dusted with new September snow. The hayfields were brown and stubbled after the last cutting, the ranch ponds a dark, cold blue. The hedgerows and windbreaks of the old cottonwoods were just starting to turn the tenderest of greens. In another month they would be the color of flames. Celine pushed the truck past the seventy-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. Traffic was now sparse.
“And so what were you thinking, Pete?” Celine said finally.
“Well, imagine it. This man who refuses to do anything conventional. He marries a refined and shy South American beauty who excites attention and speaks English more properly than any of his friends. He worships her as only an artist can, as only a lover with a fierce eye for beauty. He earns a living as a freelance photographer—no surprise there—and travels to the most exotic distant places and puts himself in extremely dangerous situations—again no surprise—in order to bring back award-winning photographs. They have a child. Whom he esteems just as beautiful. There are almost as many pictures of Amana with Gabriela and Gabriela alone as of his stunning wife. When the child is old enough they enroll her in a brand-new experimental school—knowing what we know of the man, how could he resist it? And then Amana dies. Sudden and unexpected. The one thing aside from his young daughter that he has loved unequivocally, without reserve.”
Pete paused. The import of what he had just told seemed to stop him in his tracks. He took a second to clear his throat, regain his composure. Celine glanced over. Beneath Pa’s Old Mainer reserve was an impressionable soul.
“So.” Pete cleared his throat. “What does he do? He is, literally, at a loss. He can’t do anything but drink, which, by the way, he is especially good at. He is so overwhelmed with loss and grief he can no longer keep track of the one other thing he loves. Imagine the terror of that. He loves Gabriela, he loves her. But his faculties—the ones we use for day-to-day survival—are broken. I tracked down Miss Lough, the third-grade teacher—” Now Celine turned her head in surprise. Her lips tightened.
“I was going to tell you, but you were in one of your states getting ready for this trip. I thought I’d better wait until you could really hear it.”
Celine’s face relaxed. She forgave him. Phew.
“The former teacher told me that he often forgot to pick Gabriela up at school, that she would call him at home and if she reached him he was often slurred with drink and that when he did show up to get her he hugged and gripped Gabriela like a life ring. Her words: ‘He held her like one of those life rings you throw to a drowning man. And sometimes I could see he was crying, though he tried to hide it.’ Think of the nightmare, the loss he could not abide and the confusion and self-hatred caused by his own incapacity as a father. Miss Lough, now Mrs. Khidriskaya, said that she kept food in the classroom because Gabriela often showed up hungry. He must have seen in flashes of clarity the harm he was doing to the only other thing he cherished. It may have only been Gabriela that kept him from suicide. So what else does he do, a man desperately clutching a life ring? He scrambles into the first lifeboat that comes along. Danette Rogers. ICU nurse. Specializing in bringing patients back from the precipice of death. Certified sexpot. I also talked to her supervisor at San Francisco General”—Pete held up a hand (peace!) and chuckled—“just day before yesterday. Marie St. Juste told me that Nurse Rogers had a reputation for putting powerful doctors into situations they could not easily wriggle out of. ‘She was a man-eater!’ Marie said in a baffled Haitian accent. ‘I can’t count the doctors, good Lord!’ I recorded the conversation, it was wonderful, you can listen to it later.”
Celine could only forage in her bag for another piece of jerky. This was too good.
“Danette bragged one afternoon that she had met a National Geographic photographer at a bar on Haight Street. She lived in the Mission but came into the Haight to hunt, I guess. When she was tired of doctors and wanted a big strong free-loving hippie.” Pete managed to look bemused. “She said Lamont was the most charismatic man she had ever met, one of the most handsome, too, and the saddest. And drunk. She bragged that she screwed him in the telephone booth in back of the bar. But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Marie St. Juste said that she was really bothered about this man. ‘She could forget anyone!’ Marie declared. ‘Drop him like a Kleenex, you know? But this man, he really bothered her. Every day she went on about this photographer. One day she told us she was going to have to marry him! Ayee, imagine! Well, you should have seen our faces!’” Pa smiled an inward smile. He always took delight in the pure souls of the earth, wherever they shone.