The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [37]
“No.”
She undressed slowly with none of the businesslike resolve she mustered for the daily sittings. Max took her wet clothes and rinsed the salt from them in the sink. Fallon was reclining in the tub when he returned to hang them before the hearth.
He could sense her cautiously relaxing into this new realm. They’d never been together in the studio past dusk before, and he knew how it transformed once the sun set. No longer flooding the space with light, all those windows became dark mirrors, reflecting the fire, skylights revealing the stars as they came out. He didn’t bother turning any lamps on, letting the flames be the only illumination. He found two glasses in the dark pantry and filled each with wine.
Fallon accepted her glass. “Thanks. For that too.” She pointed to her drying clothes and the fireplace. Max’s eyes in the darkness were like passages to a black, fascinating, unknown destination.
“Not a problem.” He meandered to the opposite end of the tub and set his glass on a stack of books. He sank to his knees, resting his arms on the rim of the tub above Fallon’s feet, his chin on his crossed wrists.
She sipped her wine. “You’re staring.”
“And you’re naked.”
“That’s nothing new to you.”
“Do you see a chisel in my hand? Am I working?”
She bit her lip. “Oh. So if you’re not working this is suddenly sexual?”
He merely smiled, his eyes roaming over her shoulders and knees above the surface.
“And this.” She held up the glass. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“To what end?” she asked, trying to downplay how shameless she found his honesty.
Max shrugged. “Maybe you’ll answer questions. Maybe you’ll stay the night, in my bed. By yourself, of course.”
“Oh?”
“And tomorrow my sheets will smell like you.”
Fallon stared into her wine. “I want to know something about you.”
“Shoot.”
“I only know a little about your life before you moved here. How were you discovered so young?”
He took a deep drink and nodded, somber. “Well, I was discovered, as you put it, shortly after my mother died. She is the reason I am how I am, I think. And my father as well, in a more obvious sense.
“In our village, he was the monument maker. He made gravestones, mostly. His father too. Very glamorous, yes? And maybe I would have as well, if things hadn’t turned out the way they did.” He stood to retrieve the bottle and refill his glass.
“So,” he continued. “I am twelve. My mother has been sick for several years—a degenerative neurological disease. She is an angel, my mother. I know, that sounds so Catholic of me, and I am such a poor Catholic now. But she was everything to me. For the last three years of her life, she lost her eyesight, gradually, until she was totally blind. Some hearing too, and she communicated through touch, you see?” He held his hands up, fanning his fingers out, then took another deep drink.
“I’m beginning to,” Fallon offered.
“So, my mother dies.” He knelt again, closing his eyes for a moment and crossing himself in a reflexive fashion. “And my father is too distraught to make her gravestone, so I do it. I had never carved marble before, not even granite. I only watched, ever, and handed my father tools. And I carve her not only a stone, but a statue.”
“An angel,” Fallon said, picturing the haunting monument from the newspaper article.
“Exactement. It consumed me, for perhaps two weeks. No food, no sleep. Like a possession, almost. And they did a story about it in the village paper, and someone in Rennes hears. Then Paris. Then suddenly, I am being taken away to London. My father, he insisted, otherwise I would have stayed. And before you know it, I am in New York.”
“Which you hated,” Fallon said as he paused to refresh her glass.
He nodded. “I did, but I didn’t realize that right away. It took me many years to understand that success and fame are not synonymous. Or even desirable.
“My father, he gave up, after my mother died. They were very close, my parents. Always very much in love, even when she was too sick to leave her bed. He went downhill