Читать книгу Pages For Her - Sylvia Brownrigg - Страница 14

Charles charmed her, compelled her, pursued her.

His beard was a deep animal brown that matched his warm dark eyes, and his laugh was like a punctuating blast from the orchestra’s brass section. He found Flannery amusing, and himself too, as he unspooled practiced, theatrical tales of his exotic life in a world Flannery knew little of – galleries, studios, commissions. The humor in his stories came from his sharp eye for surreal detail (‘So we open this gargantuan box and under a thousand peppermint-green Styrofoam popcorn nuggets find this exquisite little eagle skull, the size of a walnut’) and neat way of puncturing inflated egos, if not always his own (‘So the guy’s standing there holding his champagne flute talking about the St. Kitt’s wedding he went to and flinging names down, all the pop stars and moguls who were there. It was like celebrity confetti, you couldn’t even see the ground around him for all the names he’d dropped’). Flannery could sense the energy and wit in Charles’s art mirrored in these performances. The scale on which Charles Marshall created, along with the sheer dimensions of his success – in the nineties he was the American Pavilion’s featured artist at the Venice Biennale – reassured Flannery. He was large enough to shelter her after her own overexposure (her skin still felt pink and peeling from the experience with A Visit to Don Lennart, as if she’d been irradiated by all the attention) and more than that, to dwarf with his notoriety the very brief period of hers.

‘Flannery Jansen?’ Charles Marshall laughed, shaking her hand, engulfing hers with his supple and substantial paw. ‘The author of the book about Mexico?’

She nodded, oddly surprised that this man knew of it. Hadn’t she seen gossip page pictures of him with an indie film star on his arm? And maybe years before that, when she was still in college, a reference somewhere to his lavish wedding to an East Coast heiress?

‘Sex in the saguaro patch. Right?’

Flannery nodded again with a practiced smile. The saguaro patch always came up. ‘The single best-known thing about me,’ she said with mock ruefulness, pushing her sandy hair behind her ear. ‘It’s like my signature tune, that scene – it follows me wherever I go.’

‘But you knew it would. Right?’ The man had not quite let go of Flannery’s hand. ‘Two girls going at it, fueled by tequila – a great steamy scene, and cactus spines to be extracted afterwards, bringing it back to comedy. Come on! It had everything.’

Flannery agreed obligingly, and then Charles issued his brief brass laughter and she, disarmed, found herself joining him. She had had this scene quoted back to her a hundred times, yet somehow in his telling it seemed comical to her again, and better than that – forgivable.

They were standing close enough by then that Flannery could smell him, and something stirred in her. Charles Marshall had the scent of real stuff about him – oil, paint, wood, steel – unlike all the writers she knew who gave off the air of nothing more substantive than neurosis, perhaps the lingering aura of a struggle with language. She was tired of writers, herself included. They did not build. They needed no muscles. Their hands were scrawny, and lacked strength.

Lust traveled between Charles and Flannery in the gallery. It was dense enough that you could almost touch it, and Flannery, young though she still could be, was old enough to recognize that they both intended to satisfy their desire.