Via Dolorosa (20 page)

“Handsome Nicholas,” she said, standing above him and wringing out the wet length of her hair. She wore a two-piece bathing suit nearly the color of her flesh. The dual thrust of her nipples was proudly visible through the taut cups of fabric. There was nothing of imperfection about her body. He suddenly wanted to paint her. “Handsome, handsome Nicholas.”

“Hello.”

“You do not like the water?”

“Sometimes.”

“Not today?”

“Not today,” he said.

“You’re a brooder,” she told him.

“All right.”

“Brooder,” she said.

“How did your photo shoot go? Did you get all the pictures you wanted?”

“Oh, it went very nice. There were some very nice ruined houses.”

“Lovely.”

“You are sarcastic, yes?”

“Not me.”

“You are,” she said. “I can tell.”

“Just seems a morbid thing to take photos of, is all.”

“Why is that?”

He waved a hand at her. “Forget it.”

“You are an artist, just like me. You never paint morbid things?”

“I try not to.”

“Isn’t that a pity,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because so many morbid things happen in real life, and you do not feel they are important enough to document.”

“That’s some way to look at things.”

“It is only my way.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Do you hate me for last night, Nicholas?”

“No.”

“I think maybe you do.”

“Well you think wrong. Why would I hate you for last night? Nothing happened.”

“I was thinking that was why you hated me.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You were having a good time and enjoying yourself for most of the night.”

“Sure.”

“You got funny near the end, though,” she informed him.

“Yeah, well, it happens,” he said. In truth, he didn’t know
what
the hell had happened to him last night. Something in his head, in his brain, had shifted. Briefly, he had forgotten where he was…
who
he was…

For lack of a more manly gesture, he retrieved a cigarette from the breast pocket of his shirt. Lit it. Smoked.

Isabella knelt down on the edge of the towel, just two feet from him. He could see the heels of her feet breaded with sand. Her demitasse toes dug pits in the sand. Winding her hair behind her head, she shifted her eyes to where Emma still swam in the surf. “Your wife,” she said, “she is a timid swimmer.”

“She’s afraid to go too far out.”

“What’s to be afraid of?”

Tendrils of smoke drifted before his face from the tip of his cigarette. He said, “What the hell do the two of you have in common, anyway? What are you trying to pull?”

Isabella laughed. “Pull.” The word was funny to her. “Pull-pull-pull.” Still laughing, she let her head come back slightly on her neck and ran a hand down her throat. Her skin was very brown, almost black, and still wet from the sea. When she laughed, her teeth were very white. In broad daylight, the unity of her features still managed to maintain a sense of the obscure, like hidden secrets suddenly shouted from a penthouse window in a desolate city.

“Forget it,” he muttered.

“Do you think I am a bad influence on your wife, Nicholas?”

“I don’t know what to think. You might just be a bad influence on me.”

“You are such a man,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “here we go with that again.”

“Oh, don’t be so bitter!” She frowned, but playfully. “You’ve got something rotten and bitter deep within you. Soon, you will be like those ruined houses I saw today. All broken and caved in and looking like no god has ever loved them.”

“I’m like that.”

“And this could be true.”

“Sure it is,” he said. “Sure it is.”

“It seems you ask me the same question I can ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“What do you and your wife have in common, Nicholas? Seems a very bitter honeymoon to me.”

“You’re just trying to provoke me.”

“Am I? Because you seem offended. There must be something there, all right, if it is in danger of being provoked. Yes?”

“Yes. No. Whatever.”

“Boo,” she said. Then, “We talked about the Chinese divers, Emma and I.”

“How exciting.”

“You’re sarcastic, but I think so. I think it is very exciting. What do you think it looked like, Nicholas, as all those Chinese divers drowned at the same time?”

“Probably a lot of flailing arms,” he said. “Probably a lot of screaming and shouting in a language I don’t understand.” He frowned. “How the hell should I know?”

“There were seventeen of them.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“That,” she said, “is a lot of flailing arms.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a lot of screaming in a language you don’t understand.”

“I suppose.”

“They probably grabbed at each other, tried to brave the current through the power of unity. And failed.”

“That’s cheerful.”

Isabella frowned. “Do you not like me?”

“I like you fine.”

Then she smiled just as easily. Yet her lips looked predatory. They were full, dark, mocha lips. “Sometimes,” she said, “I fill up a bathtub with water and hold my head underneath until I think I am about to black out. I see how long I can hold my head under water, and I try to experience what it is like to almost die, almost drown. I see how far along I can get, Nicholas, and how close to dying I can bring myself without actually doing it. I wait for some great change, or for something insurmountable and unimaginable to overtake me. But it is just water and it is just my head, and so far nothing has happened.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“Of course,” she said, yawning. “Of course it is. Isn’t it?”

Emma had come from the water and was heading toward them. Wet, pale, she looked cold from the water. She had her arms folded about her small chest.

“Now I feel like a complete intruder,” Isabella said, standing. Coltish legs peppered in sand, the contrast against her black skin would have made an amazing painting. Nick could not pull his eyes away.

“It’s all right,” Emma said.

“No—no. Forgive me, both of you.”

“Really,” Emma said, but she had already taken Isabella’s place at the foot of the towel. “Will we see you again?”

“Whenever you wish,” Isabella said. Her eyes were on Nick as she said it. “I am like a ghost, floating around…”

“Adios,”
Emma called.

“Adios,”
answered Isabella, pronouncing the
d
with a
th
sound as she proceeded to walk off. Both Nick and Emma watched her head back down toward the sea. At one point, just before crossing back into the surf, Isabella removed the top portion of her bathing suit and let it drop to the sand. Whether accidentally or not, she half-turned her body so that they could both view the taunting brown swell of her right breast. Pulling her hair up off the nape of her neck with both hands, she retreated back into the ocean—comfortably, willingly, surrendering—as if it were the only place of welcome on the planet.

“She is very strange,” Emma commented.

“She’s a righteous bitch,” he said.

“You don’t really think that,” she said.

“Oh? Why do you think so?”

“Because,” she said, “your eyes—the way you look at her—betray you.”

So I am betrayed once again,
he thought.

Saying nothing, Emma spread out on the towel, took up one of her poetry books, and began to read.

That evening, alone, he worked on the mural. Very unlike him, he found himself spending too much time painting and repainting the faces of the people in the mural. What had originated as indiscriminate, expressionless figures had somehow transformed into the faces and expressions of actual people. He painted these faces without purpose. It was as though they were destined to be born, despite his personal involvement, and nothing was going to hinder the process. The fact that he was painting them, was their creator, was incidental. So he painted them and let them be, he merely the conduit of some greater purpose of which he had no value in contradicting. Only once did he become consumed in the manipulation of features, specific features, on one of the characters, and this was because, somehow, perhaps unconsciously, the figure, once completed, bore a frightening resemblance to young Myles Granger. It wasn’t until he had completed the face and backed away to view it from afar did he realize what he had done. Looking at it, seeing it, chilled him. Worse: he had commissioned the portrait of Myles Granger to stand directly beneath what he had initially intended to be a wide outcropping of glossy, volcanic stone, but what, from this same vantage, projected to be the undisputed outline of a steel-bodied military tank, its single cannon still hot and smoking.

Jesus Christ.

Without hesitation, grabbing the first brush his fingers fell on, he climbed the ladder and smeared a streaking tread of paint across Myles Granger’s face. Black paint. Again, Myles Granger was dead.

A mortar burst directly behind him, and he was suddenly back, back, back in Fallujah.

He turned, nearly spilling off the ladder. Behind him, looking up at him, stood Isabella Rosales. She was holding her camera up to her face. As he turned toward her, she snapped a second photograph, a third. The flashbulb was an insult in the mostly dark corridor.

“I have captured you,” the darkly handsome woman said, smiling up at him. “For all times,” she said, “I have captured you.” And she drummed a single finger against the housing of her camera.

“You’ve caught my soul, yes,” he said.

Isabella laughed. “What soul?”

“True,” he said, climbing down from the ladder. Wiping his hands down his pants, running his fingers through his corkscrew hair, he took a step toward Isabella and paused beside her. She was looking up at the mural. He, too, looked up. It looked wider, longer. He tried not to look at the smeared, blackened, charred face of dead Myles Granger. “What do you see?” he asked her.

“Oh,” she said, her eyes running the length of the mural, “I see much.”

“Do you?”

“I see pain and anger and anguish,” she told him. “I see hurt mixed with absolution. All of it, trapped like buzzing bees in a jar, all within the heart of the artist. But,” she said just as quick, “I also see a lot of love and compassion.” She nodded and looked as if she were about to take a step forward. “Yes,” she said, “I see much love and compassion.”