“That’s what all the girls say, my dear.”
A voice came from behind them, a voice low but penetrating, the voice of a woman accustomed to public speaking.
“I go away. I stand in line for one half hour with anachronistic music in my ears for the dubious privilege of using a porta-potty disguised as an eleventh-century privy. I come back to find my escort has disappeared, and when I manage to track him down, I find him guzzling beer and staring into the eyes of another woman.”
Despite the words, the voice did not sound troubled, and the face, when Kate hitched around to face it, was only amused.
Kate nodded seriously.
“You just can’t get good escorts these days,” she told the woman.
“My dear,” shouted Hawkin happily, “this is Casey Martinelli. Kate, this is Jani Cameron.”
“Kate,” said Kate firmly, and held out her hand. Another, smaller hand waved up from behind the crates, thrust vaguely in Kate’s direction. Kate stretched and shook that one too.
“And that’s Jules,” added Hawkin. He slithered down from their impromptu seat, swore at the splinters, and helped Kate get down undamaged.
“Jani is the world’s foremost authority on medieval German literature, and Jules is going to be San Francisco’s youngest D.A. You needn’t worry about Kate, Jani,” he added offhandedly. “She’s a lesbian.”
Kate buried her face in her cup, which was already empty, and so missed the woman’s reaction, but when she looked back the child was examining her with considerable interest. Finally, with the academic air of someone discussing the historical development of the iota subscript, she spoke.
“Are you, in fact, a lesbian, or more properly speaking bisexual?” she began. “I was reading an article the other day that stated—”
There was a rapid dispersion of the party toward the food tents, with Jules and her mother in the rear in intent conversation (consisting of a firm low voice punctuated with several But Mothers) and Hawkin and Kate in front, he grinning hugely, she decidedly pink, from the beer and the sun, no doubt, but smiling gamely.
At the food tents Kate allowed herself to be steered past the Cornish pasties (beef, vegetarian, or tofu) and tempura prawns (medieval Japanese, she assumed) to the sign that advertised the dubious claims of something called “toad in the hole.” It turned out to be a spicy sausage in a gummy bread surround, but when she had washed it down with another beer and followed it with strawberries in cream (poured, not whipped, and with honey, not sugar—authenticity reigned in the strawberry booth), she was content.
The three adults sat on a bench in the shade of a colorful tarpaulin while Jules stalked off to try her hand at a game suspiciously like the ancient three-cup sleight-of-hand con game. Hawkin smiled almost paternally as the child stood gazing in intense concentration at the current players, a metal-mouthed page girl amid the lords and ladies who swept up and down the avenues among the stalls of crafts, foods, and games. The three of them chatted comfortably about Tyler, festivals, minor gossip concerning the department, the development of music, and the production of beer. At the end of half an hour Kate realized that Jani was someone she could easily come to like, and furthermore she saw that Hawkin was very much in love with her. She was quiet, even aloof, in manner, but listened carefully to words and currents, and when she spoke it was precise, to the point, and, like her daughter, not always politic. She and Hawkin argued, laughed, and touched, as if old companions, and other than a twinge of pain at the thought of Lee in the mechanical bed at home, she was glad. Eventually Jani stood up, gathered her brocade skirts, and went off after her daughter, with an agreement to meet Hawkin beneath the golden banner in half an hour to watch a demonstration of swordplay.
They watched her go.
“I like her,” Kate told him.
“I’m glad. She’s a remarkable woman.”
“And as for her daughter…”
He laughed. “She’s something, isn’t she? Poor Trujillo, he’s terrified of her.”
“Have you seen Vaun?”
“A number of times. I brought Jani and Jules here to meet her, on Monday, in fact. We drove up.”
“Ah, yes, Monday being one of the days cars are allowed. I take it Tyler’s prohibitions are back in force.”
“Slightly modified. They’ve strung a telephone line through the trees, to Angie’s place and the Riddles’.”
“Sacrilege. How is she? Vaun?”
“Recovering. Fragile. Determined. She sent you the pass.”
“I thought so.” She watched the mob, unseeing, until the question leaped out of her. “Did he win?” Was it all in vain? Were lives shattered, was Lee crippled, were three children dead, four, so that Andrew Lewis could win his creative revenge? Did we catch him and kill him and still lose the one faint spark that might have justified it? Did he have the last word in the whole disastrous, ugly, horrifying mess? Did he win?
“No.” His answer was sure. “No, he did not. She’s painting again. Vaun Adams is an even greater human being than she is an artist, if that’s possible. She is not going to allow him to win.”
“Thank God,” she said, and heard the tremble in her voice. “Lee—Lee will be glad,” she added, inadequately, but his eyes said he understood.
“You’ll want to see her,” he said, and stood up.
“Have you any idea where she is? I saw Mark Detweiler at the entrance and he said she was here, though I’d have thought she’d be hiding out.”
“She is, like the purloined letter.”
In a few minutes Kate saw the sense of this cryptic statement, as Hawkin pointed her to a seated figure, clapped her on the back, said he’d call her Sunday night, and went off to find his Jani. Eva Vaughn had disguised herself as a painter—of faces. She was dressed in characteristically understated fashion—as a nun—but her face was transformed by greasepaint into the visage of a cat. Not that she had fur, ears, and black whiskers drawn on, but the arched eyebrows, self-contained mouth and neat chin were decidedly feline.
She was finishing the delicate webbing that outlined huge butterfly wings covering a young woman’s face, the eyes two matching dots high up on the upper wings, the nose blackened as the body. It was a most disconcerting image, like a double exposure in a piece of surrealistic cinema, for the wings trembled with the movements of the face. The woman paid and went happily off with an astounded boyfriend, and a child settled in anticipation on the stool in front of her. Vaun spoke to him for a moment, smiled a feline smile, and turned to rummage through the tubes at her side. Kate stood and watched, but suddenly Vaun glanced up. The catty smile became tentative, and she got up and went to stand before Kate. She reached out a hand to touch Kate’s arm, and drew it back.
“You came, then. I so wanted to see you, but I didn’t think you’d come, until I thought, maybe, this would bring you.”
“I would have come.”
“Would you?”
“Maybe not at first,” she admitted, “but I’m here now.”
“Look, just let me finish this one and then I’ll shut down for the day.”
The child’s requested face, that of an alien monster, grew up from the chin, with eyes that bulged when he puffed out his cheeks. He tried this out in the mirror, delighted; his parents paid, and Vaun firmly shut her box and stuck it under the drapery of the nearby weaver’s stall (not Angie’s, Kate saw). Again she made the tentative gesture toward Kate’s sleeve, and again she drew back and with her other hand waved up the hill.
“There’s a tent up there for us, the residents. Let me go and take this stuff off my face.”
The house-sized canvas tent, a green one this time, was set off by a low fence and signs that informed the public that this was For Residents Only. It was high up in the meadow, brushed by the low branches of the first redwoods, and the opening was on the uphill side. Kate followed Vaun into the cool, spacious interior, which was scattered with chairs, tables, mirrors, portable clothes racks, sleeping children, and perhaps a d
ozen adults. A young man in shepherd’s dress stood up at their entrance, took up his crook, and stalked toward them with an aggressive set to his shoulders. Vaun held up a pacifying hand, appropriately nunlike.
“It’s okay, Larry, she’s a friend.”
He stopped, his petulance fading into embarrassment.
“Oh. Right. Sorry, it’s just that we’ve had about ten people in here already snooping around, and Tyler said…”
“That they’d be looking for me? What did you tell them?”
“Like Tyler said, you’re in New York. One of them didn’t believe me, but she was pretty stoned.”
“I’m sorry to give everyone the problem, but it’d be the same even if I were in New York. If you see Tyler or Anna, would you tell them I’ve gone up the hill and that I don’t know if I’ll be here for the dinner or not, but not to save me a plate. Thanks.”
With a shrug and a swirl the habit came off. Vaun hung it and the veil on one of a series of chrome racks that held an odd assortment of garments, from dull homespun jerkins to a brilliant brocade cape, and dozens of empty wire hangers. The ex-nun, dressed now in shorts, sandals, and a damp T-shirt, went to a table and mirror and began rubbing cream from a large tub into her face. The feline cast to her eyes and the catty mouth disappeared beneath a scrap of cloth, and then Vaun was there, in the mirror, as Kate had seen her (was it only four months before?)—black curls, ice-blue eyes, a waiting expression.
But different. Somehow very different.
And then Vaun turned from the mirror and met her gaze evenly, and Kate knew what it was: the eyes.
Before, Vaun’s eyes had been so withdrawn as to appear dead and gave away no hint of the person behind them. They were no longer uninhabited; no longer did they appear to mirror the world without influence of the person. These eyes were clear, immediate, and revealing windows leading directly into a vivid person. Whatever else Andrew Lewis had done, he had stripped from Vaun her apartness, her defense. There was no hiding now, for this woman. She stood naked.
All this in an instant, and Kate turned away, shaken. Vaun put the top on the removal cream and stood up. This time her hand made contact with Kate’s arm and stayed there for a moment.
“Do you have time to come up with me, to the house?”
“I have all day.”
“Let’s go then.”
The two women left the tent and plunged into the trees like a pair of truant schoolgirls, lifting strands of barbed wire for each other, crunching softly through the dry duff beneath the heavy branches, speaking little in the thick stillness that gradually overcame the distant fair and was then broken only by the harsh calls of jays and the occasional chained dog. It was not a long walk, those four miles, but an immensely satisfying one to Kate; and slowly, in the heat and the silence and the easy companionship, and in the awareness of her decision, she felt the last of the grinding unhappiness lift from her and felt herself not far from wholeness.
In the house Vaun waved her upstairs to the studio and went off to the kitchen for cold drinks. The house seemed like something from a distant childhood, Kate thought, dimly remembered but immensely evocative, and she climbed the stairs in mild anticipation of the tidy airiness of Vaun’s work space. When she cleared the stairs she had a considerable shock.
The large room was a swirl of color, a frozen moment of intense, urgent activity. The long tables were piled precariously with pads, torn-out sheets of paper scribbled with half-finished sketches, tubes and tubs, brushes, congealed coffee cups, the stubs of ancient sandwiches, brown and mushy apple cores, two bowls with spoons and unrecognizable scum in the bottom. A length of dried orange peel trailed from one work top and disappeared into a closed drawer. Balled-up sheets of thick white paper spilled in a drift from an overflowing waste basket, and there seemed to be at least three palettes currently in use, and four easels.
And the paintings.
All around the walls, two and three deep, the paintings leaned, pulsated, reached out and grabbed the viewer and shouted. Huge paintings, in size as well as temperament—essential, stripped down, powerful faces and bodies, and more than half of them were Andy Lewis. Andy Lewis as Tony Dodson, with Angie. Andy Lewis naked in front of a mirror, meeting the viewer’s eyes in the reflection and looking proud and scornful and as sinuous as the tattooed dragon writhing on his arm. Andy Lewis with a beard, looking down with aloof speculation at a child with blond braids. Andy Lewis in a cold rage, a dangerous killing animal that made the flesh creep and the eyes wince away. And finally, on an easel, Andy Lewis with a gun, mocked as a cowboy and acknowledged as a murderer.
Somehow there was a cold glass in her hand, and she realized that Vaun was standing next to her.
“You’ve…been busy,” she said weakly. Vaun seemed not to hear her but stood with critical eyes on the naked Andy Lewis.
“He did love me, you know,” Vaun mused. “In that he was speaking the plain truth. And he was right too in saying that I never loved him. The only man I’ve ever loved is doubly safe—both married and my therapist. Perhaps I am saved by my inability to love,” she said in consideration, as if Kate were not in the room. “I’ve never understood how men, and women too, can carry on tumultuous love affairs and still paint. Affection, yes, and lust certainly. Those I understand. But not love.”
“You paint it,” protested Kate. Vaun glanced at her, then back at the painting.
“Not often, no. When I have, it’s usually been one part of something else; loss, or threat. Although recently, I have been trying.” They stood for a long minute.
“I wanted him to kill me,” she said abruptly. “That night. It was crazy, but it just swept over me, a lust, like sex but stronger. When he came through your door, it seemed right. Not good, but just the only possible way for it all to end. I knew that after all those years he’d come to finish it, and I so wanted it to end, to be taken out of my hands. I wanted him to kill me,” she repeated.
“I’m very glad he did not,” said Kate quietly.
Vaun sighed and looked at her glass.
“Yes. I have days now when I begin to feel the same.” She smiled. “Tell me about Lee.”
So Kate told her about Lee, about the surgeries and the slow recovery, about Lee’s mind and spirit, about their friends, about her own decision to return to the work that had nearly cost her lover’s life. They sat in the hot stillness of Vaun’s deck until the afternoon brought a movement of cool air from off the sea, and eventually they went back inside. Kate stopped in front of one of the canvases that was not of Andy Lewis but rather of a young girl with short brown hair and a missing front tooth.
“Jemma Brand?” she asked.
Vaun nodded, paused, and seemed to come to a decision. She tipped the picture forward and reached for the painting in back of it, and when she slid it out, Lee was in the room, Lee standing on legs that were whole and strong at the railing of the Alcatraz ferry, Lee half-turned to look over her shoulder with the laughter spilling out of her, her mouth poised for speech, her tawny hair tumbling about her face in the wind, the whole brilliant light of her blazing out of her eyes. To a stranger it would be a dazzling portrait; to Kate it sent a jolt through every nerve in her body and left her stunned and speechless.
She turned to Vaun, eyes wide and filling, mouth moving helplessly, and then she was crying against Vaun’s bony shoulder, feeling the painter’s strong arms around her and hearing the age-old litany of comfort.
“It’s all right, Kate, it’s all right now.”
And though she knew that it was not all right, would never be completely all right, she felt, for the first time, that perhaps it might be.
A GRAVE TALENT. Copyright © 1993 by Laurie R. King. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Libra
ry of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Laurie R.
A grave talent / Laurie R. King.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book.”
ISBN: 978-0-312-08804-0
I. Title.
PS3561.14813G7 1993
813′.54—dc20
92-42571
CIP
Laurie R. King, A Grave Talent
(Series: # )
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