Mount Terminus (37 page)

She sat down beside him and without speaking she took from him his sketchbook. I should explain, Bloom said to her as she sorted through the pages and lingered over the panels in which she and he were naked and entwined inside the cave walls. She was quiet for some time, tracing her finger around the curves of their figures.

She then looked up and smiled. There is nothing to explain.

But, Bloom insisted, these drawings, they aren't what they appear to be.

Obviously amused at Bloom's need to explain himself, she said, I know what these are drawings of. She then pointed to the image Bloom had drawn of himself, and, suppressing a smile, said, Odysseus? Bloom nodded, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. But, she asked, now enjoying this power she held over him, who, I want to know, is your Penelope? When she asked him this question, Bloom saw what couldn't be gleaned from an image drawn by a second-rate artist promoting a circus act. He saw in her face the one characteristic she shared with her brother, the same incisive and compassionate eyes.

Isabella, said Bloom.

She nodded and then asked if Isabella was very far away.

No. She's dead.

When?

Recently.

I'm sorry for you. And then Estella said as she looked one more time at his drawings, You have a vivid style. She shut the sketchbook and placed it back in his lap.

She offered Bloom her hand, which he took hold of, and she said to him as she turned his hand over and studied his fingers, I'll show you to Eduardo's room.

Bloom trailed behind the long gown of Estella Maria Tourneur as they walked up the stairs inside the house's turret. She led him to the door of her brother's room, where, hanging in its many windows, Bloom found cages shaped like lampshades, nearly a dozen of them, holding giant macaws and cockatoos and exotic birds he couldn't have imagined existed until he saw these; they were vibrant and colorful, with tall crests and headdresses, with all varieties of decorative plumage. Bloom surveyed the cages and when he was through he turned back to Estella, who was standing in the doorway, backlit from the sun shining through a window across the hall. They're magnificent, Bloom said. Bloom saw in the shadow the tip of Estella's chin lower, then rise. He continued to move from cage to cage and looked more carefully at Eduardo's treasures, and asked Estella where they all came from. Estella told him over the birds' cacophonous squawks and songs that most of them Eduardo had collected in tropical ports when he worked the cargo ships across the channel. Will you be comfortable here? she asked.

Yes, said Bloom, of course. Eduardo's room may have been spartan, as the only furnishings were a twin bed and a rather drab throw rug, but with the birds jumping and shuffling back and forth on their perches, and with views of the shoreline and the garden out the turret's windows, he was reminded of the tower's pavilion. I feel very much at home, he told Estella. More than you can possibly know.

Appearing neither pleased nor displeased that he found the room to his liking, she said he should join her for some dinner as soon as he settled in. She then excused herself and shut the door behind her. The birds quieted and grew still upon her departure. The sun had set and was warming the sky with a blood-orange glow.

*   *   *

To dinner, Estella wore her hair pinned up and a long strand of pearls wrapped once around her throat, leaving the rest to hang loosely over her naked breastbone. They sat across from each other in an intimate silence, and ate a simple meal of Garibaldi, which smelled of citrus, and thin slices of avocado, and a small mound of rice. And together they looked out to the approaching swells. They didn't speak very much; rather, they listened to the powerful waves crash onto the rocks below, sometimes with so much force the dining room window would quaver inside its frame. When they had finished eating, Estella told Bloom to leave the table as it was and invited him into the sitting room, where, without asking, she poured for him a tall glass of whiskey and asked him to sit on the end of the couch where he could best see her sitting at the piano, and then all the time looking at him and never for a moment at her hands, she played for him a slow, ponderous piece of music he didn't know, and when she was through with this, with only a brief pause, she played another. Bloom felt himself too sensitive to the intensity of her eyes to want to look away from them, so he looked to her as she looked to him. It was only after he took his last sip of whiskey that she stopped, and he realized then she had been playing all this time for his pleasure. As soon as he had finished, Estella told him to leave his glass on the table, and then she wished him good night, and walked out the side door she had earlier entered.

When Bloom had returned to Eduardo's room, he saw her through the window, on the lawn kneeling under the bar of Guillaume's trapeze, which was twisting about in the wind. He watched her talk to her dead and buried husband for some time before he felt the whiskey and the smoke and the excitement of the day take its toll. He prepared for bed, and the instant he set his head on Eduardo's pillow, he joined the birds in their slumber.

Bloom wasn't quite sure how long he was asleep when he felt the touch of Estella's hand on his cheek. She placed a finger over his lips when he opened his eyes, tilted her head slightly, observed his face, as if awaiting Bloom's reaction to her uninvited presence at his bedside. Bloom, who was no stranger to a nocturnal intrusion, remained passively reclined. He merely looked at Estella's moonlit face and said nothing when she removed her finger from his mouth and slipped this same hand under his shirt, pressed her palm against his chest. Did you make love to Isabella? she asked.

No, said Bloom.

As if both stating a fact and asking a question at the same time, she said, But you've made love to women before.

No, said Bloom, shaking his head. Not in the biblical sense. No.

And then she said in the same tone, Well, you'll make love to me.

Bloom told her he was still in love with Isabella.

Estella said she was still in love with Guillaume.

But, said Bloom, Guillaume is dead.

As is Isabella. Trust me, she said. You'll see. I know your sadness. I intend to help you. As a mother would assist a child, Estella lifted Bloom's shirt over his head, and as he lay naked before her, she ran her fingers down his throat and along the length of his body. Now, said Estella, don't move. She stood up and pulled the straps of her gown over her shoulders and let it fall to her feet, revealing to Bloom in the moonlight a scar from a burn running under her left arm to the curve of her hip. She now returned to him, straddled his waist, and took hold of his hand, ran it over the scar's marbled surface. Next time you draw me, she told him, you can make me complete. When Bloom felt her scar, whatever resistance remained within him, whatever little tug of conscience he felt, faded. He sat up and kissed the burned flesh, tasted with his tongue its uneven texture.

No, she said, pushing his head back onto the pillow. No, she repeated as she lowered his hands to her hips. Now shut your eyes, she said, and dream of Isabella.

Why?

To keep her memory alive.

Bloom shut his eyes and did as Estella said. He searched for a memory of Isabella. He recalled those many times he held her in the gallery, when he touched the soft flesh of her stomach through the seam of her blouse, lifted the material of her dresses to caress the back of her thighs. The memory was interrupted as Estella began to move. Her movement awakened the birds. They began to sing and squawk and shuffle and jump about in their cages, and Bloom recalled the first time he and Isabella stood in the pavilion, before his aviary with the invertiscope harnessed to his shoulders. Estella shifted her weight, and taking Bloom by surprise, her body swallowed him. Bloom had been touched by Roya's hand, by his own hand, he had been taken into the lush paradise of a woman's mouth, but he had never sensed so complete a pleasure as he felt now. Estella bore down on him, her ass rising and falling athletically, steadily, rhythmically. Her hands pressed against his chest to form a beautiful arch in her back, over which her long mane of black hair fell into the darkness behind her. When she rose to her full height over him, she was a Dionysian mystery, the goddess of everything, so far as Bloom was concerned, Ecstasy herself. Bloom braced his arms and set his hands against the attenuated slope of her small breasts. Now say her name, said Estella, as she rose. Say her name and see her face, she said, as she fell. No, said Bloom.

It's all right, said Estella, say her name. Say it, she said as she clenched her thighs tightly against his hips, tightened her grip on his penis, bore her ass down between his thighs. Isabella, said Bloom quietly and clumsily. Louder, said Estella. Clearer. Isabella, said Bloom, louder this time. Again, Estella exhaled. And again, Bloom said Isabella's name, this time with less pause and inhibition, with more feeling, and he could see her face, as clear in his mind as he could see Estella. Isabella, he said, Isabella. Over and over he said her name, and with each mention of it, Estella said, panting now, Yes, good, good, yes. And after several more mentions of Bloom's lost love, a final Yes! arrived most suddenly, and Bloom felt something indescribable. He felt Estella's body temperature rise, her skin hot to the touch; he felt her entire musculature expand and contract around him. He felt her tremble and tremble and tremble. She dug her fingers into his chest and she trembled some more, and then she said, Ready? and with only the slightest movement of her hips, she pressed her stomach against Bloom's, and the moment she did this Bloom was compelled to lower his hand from her breast and grab hold of her scar, which he squeezed with all his might, and now trembling himself, his eyes feeling as if they were about to combust into flames, he began to fill her, and as he did so, he could feel himself crying, in small jags, like a small child in the aftermath of a tantrum.

There now, said Estella as she lowered her weight onto his chest. There, there, that's good. She didn't move. The birds stilled in their cages. She continued to hold him inside her, squeezing every last drop from him. And with her warm breath on his ear, she lulled him back to sleep, still whispering, There now, there, there, that's what you needed.

And it was true. It
was
what Bloom needed. More than he knew.

In the morning, when the birds first began to stir and make noise, Eduardo gently shook Bloom awake and said it was time to go. When he had dressed, Bloom asked him if he should wake Estella to say goodbye. He said she wasn't in the house. She had left him in the middle of the night and had gone to his boat in the cove. She was now there, asleep. She says, said Eduardo, you may return should you feel the need to see her again.

*   *   *

And he would. Each time Bloom felt the memory of Isabella begin to fade from his mind, he returned to Estella. Each time he felt himself consumed by bitterness and self-pity, he drove to the port and rode with Eduardo on the last ferry of the day to Santa Ynez, and each time he visited Estella, he was able to bear his fate. They would quietly dine and watch the ocean crash against the rocks. She would play music for him as he drank his whiskey, and she would make her exit to visit Guillaume's grave. As she had done before, she would visit Bloom in the middle of the night, and he would shut his eyes and see Isabella. In time, Bloom found himself wanting to take an earlier and earlier ferry, and wanted to stay on Santa Ynez longer than the one night, for days, sometimes weeks. The island was calm and peaceful, unpopulated, and he discovered how clear his mind became when he was there. It reminded him of Mount Terminus before the arrival of his brother. It reminded him of his childhood in Woodhaven. He and Estella took long, quiet walks together, and as they grew more accustomed to each other, she told him stories of the ceaseless days traveling with the circus, on land, on sea, through the biggest and oldest of cities, into the middle of nowhere, to the smallest of prairie towns and villages, always on the move, wandering farther and farther from home. Eduardo, too, told him stories of his endless sea adventures. He had lost count of the number of times he had circumnavigated the Earth. More times than any one man should, he said. Eduardo taught Bloom how to fish off a boat. He taught him how to spear fish in the shallows. They paddled on swells into sea caves and sat under their natural cupolas at low tide, eating lunches Estella had prepared for them. They fed the seals and watched the dolphins play. They caught pigs escaped from the few ranches on the far side of the island and returned them home to be slaughtered, and they took a share of the meat home to be cured. And one night Estella took Bloom by the hand after dinner and led him to her room, to the large bed she had shared with Guillaume, and they enjoyed each other without mentioning the dead, and they held each other close through the night and into the morning, and Estella that day emptied a room whose window looked off to the sea, and Bloom looked off to the sea, and he could see in its empty expanse
The Death of Paradise.

He could see his work taking shape in his mind, and sometimes for weeks at a time, he would spend the better part of his days in this room doing no other work than thinking through the picture in his mind, and Estella never bothered him, and Eduardo never bothered him. They left him to himself. To the quiet. To the pleasures of his prolonged silences. To his most natural state of being. They all shared this in common. He loved it here, and there were times Bloom thought of never leaving. And perhaps he would have had Estella asked him to stay. He might have left Mount Terminus behind had she made the subtlest of gestures, but she didn't, so he didn't. He came and went as he pleased. Each time he returned he was warmly welcomed and embraced. Each time he left, they bid him goodbye with a warm farewell.

 

PART V

PARADISE