Mile Zero (18 page)

The fleshy backside of a standing woman in the center of the bedroom was exposed to St. Cloud. Reflected light from the sea cascaded through looming French windows, catching the woman’s blond hair in golden fire. Her fingers traced bare skin, over a curve of breasts, rested slightly on thickening nipples, then continued to her slender neck, rising higher, fingers entangling in the fire of hair.

“That’s right. That’s how I would do it.” The words rose up in a wheeze around the woman, then turned to coughing. St. Cloud could not see where the words came from, his vision blocked by the vision before him. The coughing grew faint, as if emanating deep from a well. Suddenly more words rushed forth, propelled by rasping breath. “Don’t take your fingers out of your hair! Ummmm, perfect. Exactly how I would do it. But then I’m a romantic son of a bitch.”

St. Cloud pressed his body sideways against the doorjamb, trying to bring the source of the voice into view, cocking an eye along the glittering hulk of a brass bed before which the woman stood. Atop the bed’s mountain of pillows was a frail body covered by a sheet up to an astonishingly large hairless head.

“I like the feel of that hair. Could run my fingers through it forever. Could even brush it for you. Long strokes in the afternoon. You and me by the seashore. Languid in the sand. I desire sunlight on your hair just so. Turn a little to the right. That’s it, more, perfect. Later I will brush the hair between your legs with my fingers. That’s the most difficult light to get. But that’s later. I wouldn’t sell you the moon so fast. Slowly. Slowly now. Raise your arms higher as you stroke … stroke your hair. Arms higher so I can pry underneath. I love it under the arms. Hollow of the sweet pit, secret wet. Damp place for my lips as we roll in the sand.”

The voice rose and fell in a tumble of syllables shifting quickly between growls and whines, forming words that rushed up to the edge of the next idea, then peered down over half-formed thoughts, geared up again, went two octaves higher than a dog with its tail caught in a barn door.

“Haaaaaaaaah! You know what it is I like most about you? The glint of sweat caught in the cleft of your fleshy apple. You haven’t shown it to me yet. It’s the prude that gets the worm. The light hasn’t been quite right. Nobody painted apples like the real Renoir. But that’s not painting. More like a fruit vendor shining his wares. A French monkey peeling his banana. Know what painting is? Big pictures I’m talking about now, very big pictures which fit the puzzle of life-size space. It’s those dark scoundrel dogs barking in the night of Goya’s black Pharaohs, hanging mysterious as shanks of illuminated meat in the Prado. Goya’s the king dog, not Velázquez, not El Greco, not any of your modern Spaniards with waxy mustaches and quail eggs for eyes. No. Woof-woof! Right up your soul. Raise your arms higher. Thought I said never shave under your arms. Don’t do that,
appears false, camouflage of the flesh, nude not naked. Must trust in life’s tiny epiphanies, then there can be painterly exposition. No no, do not cut off your God-given mysteries. That’s a spectacle, like a nun swallowing each bead of her sainted rosary after saying it.” The voice slowed, the enormous head on the shrunken body turning to address with an expression of playful contempt on its face an elegantly dressed man seated across the room. “Renoir … my Renoir, my little practical joke on the gods, fix those window curtains. Wind’s blowing them too much, shifting the light. I want her entire fruit plate displayed to best advantage. But what would you know about that?”

Renoir rose from a high-back wicker chair into St. Cloud’s view, his dark hair closely cropped, a narrow slice of mustache tracing his upper lip, imbuing him with the theatrical air of a vigorous but old-fashioned movie matinee idol. In the heat of the room Renoir seemed cool. He went to all the windows, fussed the curtains until the light stopped its brilliant bounce and settled evenly through gauzy material, cloaking the woman’s body with an even golden glow.

“That’s better, Renoir. Sit, you’ll interrupt the light. Don’t want any shadows falling across such a splendid piece of female business. Can’t afford distractions at my age. There’s no more muscle between my legs to rise and point with anticipation. But my mind doesn’t know that, thinks there is a muscle hardening in pursuit of carnal action. A lifetime of habit has tricked my mind into believing I am still the man I used to be. Sit sit sit. You’re blocking the light.”

Renoir looked at the woman and shook his handsome head with an air of disbelief. He ran a finger across the close cut of his mustache and sniffed the air distractedly, as if dismissing a waiter who uncorked a bottle of bad wine.

“Renoir! Sit down! You’ll ruin the light on her ass!”

“Light is a precious commodity.” Renoir spoke with a sigh as he slithered down into the wicker chair. “There’s more light at night if you know how to look. Goya’s dogs knew that.”

“What do you know about Goya that I haven’t taught you? What do you know about black dogs? The truth of female flesh is something which utterly escapes you. You have no palette to paint their light.”

“I know you can’t see a thing without your glasses. Not only is the muscle between your legs soft, you can’t even make out what stands before you. Instead you’re rhapsodizing about shapes and distant memories, barking dogs in the Prado, and a nineteenth century
Impressionist with green grocer sensibilities. Let the poor woman put her clothes back on.”

“Haaaaaaraaaaph! Twelve things you know absolutely nothing about. The first two are art and women.”

“What are your first two? Compassion and tolerance?”

“When you drift to the bottom of art history books and become a significant footnote as I’ve become, the world develops compassion for you, tolerates your every whim.”

“What is your whim?”

“To have her pull her shorts down and spank her lovely apple to a real Renoir red. To expose true female color. To show you why Renoir got it wrong and how I got it right. The world will know I got it right. I won’t be an art history footnote forever. When least expected I’ll float to the top of every chapter on twentieth century art. So much then for the fruit vendors of the world and your schoolboy interpretations of what is real and what is not.”

“Just like me, I suppose? Is that what you’re trying to say? You did it right, but it came out wrong. That why you named me after Renoir?”

“You aren’t as foolish as that mustache makes you out to be. But then how did I know how it was going to turn out? A man sends his sperm up a woman’s womb like an ambassador making some kind of a deal. Never know what’s going to walk out nine months later. A president or a jackass.”

“Get on with it. Pull her shorts down and spank her apple bottom. That’s what you keep insisting I come up here to see, isn’t it?”

“You’re being cruel, taking advantage of a strong man in a weak hour. You know … I … can’t.”

“What? Can’t get an erection? Can’t get out of bed? Can’t shine the apple?”

“Angelica! Take the rest off!” The large head rolled toward the woman, the glazed eyes pleading.

“Even my high heels? You told me never to take these off.”

“No. No. Leave those on. Everything else goes. Turn your back to me. I want the surprise of light on you. I love that shadow traveling across your shoulderblade. The play of false light. Mystery makes the woman, illusion seduces the man.”

Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right
breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath. She had a clear view of St. Cloud’s face peering from behind the door.

“Is the light where you want it now?” Angelica spoke the words straight to St. Cloud.

“Yes yes. Perfect.” The words wheezed from the bed behind her. “Straight light. Pure illusion. Bring on the barking dogs.” The voice slowed, rasping final encouragement. “Now take those shorts off.”

There was not the slightest possibility even the most worn coin could be slipped between Angelica’s tight white shorts and the smooth skin of her thighs. Yet she managed to cock her hips in a provocative angle which loosened the material until it slipped from her body to the floor, simply as a snake discards its skin. She stepped out of the shorts, her only adornment the black spike-heeled shoes which threw her glistening calves into a taut tilt. Angelica’s hands glided up, fingers locking behind her neck as she spread her folded arms to form fleshy wings. Sunlight shafting along the tops of her arms struck the short blondish hairs, creating an unmistakable stir between St. Cloud’s legs. As Angelica’s eyes met his St. Cloud slid through an alcoholic haze, back to a time that seemed close but was at least two years ago, when he was still a happily married cheating husband. St. Cloud slid through the troubled waters of his memory to the day he had taken Angelica out in his small skiff to check for customers in his stone crab traps. Angelica liked to watch him pull the wood slatted boxes up on seaweed-encrusted ropes from the sandy flats. He was fascinated by her fascination that the crabs chased into his traps after cans of cat food punched with holes. Crabcats, Angelica called them, horrified when St. Cloud severed their powerful snapping claws at the upper joint with steel cutters. With a toss overboard, and a final splash, St. Cloud bid the crabs adios until next season. He cracked his catch of bright orange claws. They feasted on sweet meat and cool wine, floating aimlessly in the harbor among the wakes of charter fishing boats, Sunday yachtsmen, and cigarette-boat speed demons affecting superior airs of drug smugglers as they roared past with defiant raised beercan salutes at pedestrian boats in their way. Angelica wanted to see the submarine pens. They were easy enough to show her. St. Cloud guided the skiff past Mallory Dock, in among the long fingers of concrete piers at the edge of the Navy base, where submarines once nested while being refitted during the First World War. P-T boats replaced the submarines during the Second World War, and
now an improbable new fleet was anchored. Hundreds of abandoned boats bobbed in the wake of St. Cloud’s skiff chugging by, crafts of every size and description, from single engine thirty-foot pleasure cruisers to sixty-foot Hatteras convertibles crowned with once gleaming stainless steel tuna towers. Two years before all had made the 180-mile passage to Mariel Bay in Cuba and returned loaded with the crowded catch Castro flushed from his jails and insane asylums. Mixed among these thousands were true political refugees, relatives and friends of those on American shores who had paid boat owners high dollar in a desperate time to ferry loved ones to the land of the free and the brave. The boat owners were repaid by the U.S. government’s impounding their vessels, leaving freedom’s flotilla to idle, list and rot, while their final consequence was unraveled through the courts. The government could not decide if the boat owners were heroic patriots or greedy opportunists. St. Cloud idled his skiff down to a slow drift. Ahead was a massive concrete bulkhead lined with an even more impressive array of captured craft.
NO TRESPASSING ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
was stenciled in red paint across hulls of an armada of marijuana tonnage and vast cocaine cargoes. Some vessels had the girth of small battleships, their steel hulks streaking rust into still water as St. Cloud’s skiff glided by impounded dreams of enterprise and the great American hustle. Angelica was beside him, sweet crab and wine on her breath. She laughingly pulled her thin T-shirt over her head, exposing shoulders and breasts to a sun piercing the calm of a deserted afternoon. St. Cloud sensed they were drifting from their time into a modern-day pirate ghost town. He was startled by a voice from one of the impounded boats. A husky male voice, its sound detached from any discernible source. Its unmistakable intent rolling steadily across still water. St. Cloud tried to determine if the originator of the words was hidden on the hulking ship with
Matto Grasso Trader
proclaimed on its bow. He saw no one. The voice came again. Its unmistakable target was Angelica. She boldly stepped to the bow of the skiff, a bare-breasted masthead. Her gaze cast across water, hunting the voice. She sought the source of the floating disembodied sounds. The echoed intentions of the words were challenged by an expression of recognition in Angelica’s widening eyes. Her naked back arched. Her gaze across water intensified its pursuit, primal hunter alert to sense of prey. The guttural male words became a challenging scent. Angelica’s eyes ferreted the source of the
voice’s lustful intentions, determined to extinguish it, take its flaming wick and snuff it between quick press of thumb and forefinger, drive the male desire back upon itself in a fury of female reciprocity.

In the glittering bedroom light Angelica’s breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St. Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man’s desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. Keep a tight leash around her neck. Jerk her whenever she strays. There was so much about being a man St. Cloud mistrusted. Angelica would sell her body to buy shoes for her small daughter, or for a gram of coke. Hers was a world of honest barter in a dishonest world. She knew the value of her goods and wasn’t about to sell short. But that was too simple. St. Cloud knew it went beyond that, to the detached voice Angelica hunted years before with wild eyes across water. To the primal strength of her sexuality. The voice of naked male intent, coming across water as a penetrating threat that distant day, had been reduced by Angelica to the cry of a helpless boy, drowning, begging salvation. The hunter’s glint in Angelica’s eyes was the same now as on that day, as she watched in her imagination the frail white body of the helpless boy go under for the third time before she reached out, ensnaring the hair, pulling the victim from watery fate with forthright passion, kissing cold lips, breathing life into another misguided soul. Angelica was a different kind of woman, demanding a different kind of man. St. Cloud hadn’t added up the differences yet, nor did he know if he understood them all, but he had utmost respect for the strength of their source. For this reason he had every intention of surviving the future.